Should we be afraid of the All-Serbian Declaration?

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

While the All-Serbian Assembly, held in Belgrade at the beginning of the month, did not differ much in tone nor the aspirations from the meetings commonly held in Zagreb or Sarajevo, for Croats and Bosniaks from the region, and, unlike the joint sessions between the Albanian government and Priština authorities it explicitly stated that Serbia respects the sovereignty of Bosnia and Herzegovina and its founding document, the Dayton agreement, it was, predictably, presented in an especially sinister light.

The view of the Serbian identity and its manifestations as somehow uniquely problematic is not only restricted to the musings of Balkan pundits. Still, it has become a strange norm in the region where even the word "Serb" is being avoided at all costs and is euphemized as "Orthodox" or "Balkan". Indeed, my friend's father - a very liberal intellectual in Zagreb - just a few years ago asked me if the word "Croat" is considered as pejorative in Serbia, as saying "Serb" is in Croatia. I informed him that it was not.

Another funny manifestation of the different approaches to identity in the region is the unease around the history of the Serbo-Croatian language. Outside of Serbia, it has almost become the norm in the public sphere to ignore the fact that the literary language, which is the basis of what is spoken and written in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Serbia, was literally constructed to be the same in 1850. In Serbia, however, the majority have little problem saying they speak the same language as most of their former compatriots, who they understand perfectly well but do understand that the issue is purely political branding.

So why is Serbian identity regarded as especially "pernicious" and "devious"—or, rather, different from most other identities in the region?

While the Serbian principality in the mid-1850s did not initially adopt the new standard of Serbo-Croatian, it certainly liked the idea of creating a more inclusive Serbian identity as it grew more independent from the Ottomans and sought to expand.

Inspired by the successes of the German and Italian reunification, the Serbian state in the latter part of the 19th century had a relatively universalist approach to identity building, being happy to have people of various faiths and customs join it, provided they would support its political aims. Thus you had people like the general Paulus Eugen Sturm (a Sorb from Görlitz), industrialist Ignjat Bajloni (an ethnic Lombard from Litomyšl), industrialist Georg Weifert (a Banat German), as well as a remarkable number of Aromanians like the playwright Branislav Nušić becoming the leading Serbs of their era, no matter their faiths, traditions or origins. Adding to that the fact that the ethnic identity in the Habsburg and especially the Ottoman Empire was rather fluid, Serbia was happy to accept (and claim) anybody willing to help its causes, including many a foreign soldier who came to Serbia to fight against the Ottomans - and later - the Austro-Hungarians.

This fluidity of identity, however, was looked at differently by the minority ethnic groups within those Empires, who relied on their identity for special privileges gained from the Imperial centre. While there also was an incentive to have as many people in your ethnos as possible, it made sense to have a test of political and identarian allegiance to not dilute the privileges (and the interests) too much, especially when there was no imminent prospect of independence. Thus, for example, you have a whole history of conflicts between the Serb-Catholics and Catholic Croats in Dubrovnik, as well as pro-Phanar and pro-Bulgarian Macedonians, as each was trying to develop its own particular identity and secure backing by various larger players. Playing the identity card makes sense if your state functions in a way that grants privileges based on a strictly defined religious or ethnic identity (e.g. the Muslim aristocracy in Ottoman Bosnia), while if you have a large, almost deserted like Serbia had in the 19th century, you do not have the ability to care. One notable exception is if a group would have better treatment from the neighbouring power, which explains the moves of the Ottoman Muslim-Slavic and Muslim-Albanian population to Ottoman-held areas in the Balkans, most of which were agreed upon in the inter-governmental treaties.

Another interesting case study in identity building in the Balkans was the principality of Montenegro, which, due to its beautiful but economically (and politically) inauspicious geography, had to rely on kinship-based clans (but who all considered themselves Serbs) as a way of organizing a state. Thus, it was less successful in creating a universalizing identity, although its king, Nikola Petrović, did see himself as a potential unifier of all Serbs (and other Southern Slavs) and was part of many such initiatives.

These various types of ethnic identity, or rather their political manifestations, persisted even in the Yugoslav era when South Eastern Europe was no longer divided by Empires.
On average, Serbs were more comfortable with the universalist Yugoslav identity as it was not dissimilar to the Serbian one, while most other groups eventually came to see it as a way of reducing their particularism and the political bargaining power of their more insular elites.

This somewhat changed due to the experiences in WWII and the wars of the 1990s; however, given contemporary Serbia's functioning multi-ethnic composition, there is still a concerted attempt to create a universalist identity in which everybody feels more welcome.

On the other hand, due to the reliance on foreign support, which seems to only, in theory, ask for tolerance but, in practice, works along the identity lines, there is less of an incentive to make people work together in Priština and Sarajevo.

Of course, it would be wrong to say that universalist identities are more or less violent or more or less just. Even the most famous ones, like France and the US, were engaged in internal and external conflicts while upholding principles of equality and inclusion. However, they do make it easier for people to transact in ethnically mixed environments with various historical grudges and traumas as they are not constantly litigated: while Socialist Yugoslavia may not have been a perfect recipe for longevity, its decision to universalize the suffering of particular identities - for example the ethnic, persecution of Serbs by Axis-collaborators among Croats, Bosniaks and Albanians - allowed it to be more functional and develop after the war. Even before that, at the birth of "Yugoslavia" as a political entity at the end of WWI, using the template of the universalist Serbian identity was seen as a solution to having several potentially dysfunctional smaller states, which would potentially constantly be at each other's throats while being economically devastated. Thanks to it, most of the successor states of former Yugoslavia developed their own modern, independent traditions of statehood and identity building.

Given that the region is still struggling to formulate and stay on a path towards a more peaceful and prosperous joint future, even decades after the last war, the Declaration of the All-Serbian Assembly can be seen as a plea for that universalist spirit.