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Article Excerpt
But it is only an illusion that nationalism's goal is a state. Although "organic" national states look like a natural product of the idea about an "organic" nation and defensive nationalism seems to be the only guarantee of preservation of its "authenticity," that state is only a prerequisite of nationalism.
Olivera Milosavljevic (2002: 44-45)
INTRODUCTION: BUFFERS AGAINST RESPONSIBILITY IN THE YUGOSLAV CASE
Much has been said and written by now about the critical issues of transitional justice in the post-Yugoslav situation, and about the problematic (non)dealing with the recent war and criminal past in Serbia and elsewhere. Yet the failure to deal with the past, especially its crimes, is only one mark of the persistence of a deeper problem that helped to create the circumstances in which collective crimes were made possible--circumstances that still persist, even though the war is over. As Arendt remarked when analyzing the elements of totalitarian domination, these phenomena can, in the form of several "temptations," not only survive a system that has been defeated but can persist further and crystallize in one form or another (Arendt, 1986: 459). What are these circumstances? I have argued elsewhere that the Yugoslav war and massive crimes, especially in the case of Srebrenica, cannot be understood by a single-cause explanation, such as calling nationalism the origin of all subsequent evil (Jalusic, 2007). In addition to many precipitating human actions and omissions, a specific climate and mentality had to be created in order to prepare people to participate in, commit to, or tolerate the crimes that occurred. This extended process of preparation can be described as the creation of what I call the "organized innocence syndrome."
There are three main ways of approaching the recent war and mass crimes and their consequences in some of the most involved regions of the former Yugoslavia-like Serbia, but also beyond. The first primarily involves denial and silence about the criminal past and an attempt at "forgetting," at leaving it to oblivion. The second represents an attempt at exonerating oneself by being a victim the violent structures, propaganda, and powerlessness, and blaming nationalist politicians and corrupt elites. The third and most problematic is a thorough "contextualization" of crimes and their apologia in the context of the new state building, sometimes also as an open justification of what has been done, which can serve to legitimate further exclusion of groups from membership in the state, insofar as it is not based on excessive violence or mass killing. This last way of approaching the criminal past is a substantially new development since the Nazi crimes of the Second World War and the subsequent postwar attempts to come to terms with them. The novelty is that, for the first time since Hitler, total exclusion from the state is considered unproblematic in a part of Europe--provided it did and does not involve the violent and uncivilized evil of mass killing.
This tribal, nationalist understanding of the nation-state and its function in the region after the collapse of socialism began to propagate with the growth of Serbian tribal nationalism and was used to "justif[y] ethnic cleansing with the goal of the protection of territory for one's own people" (Devic, 2003: 1; V. Dimitrijevic, 2003). Understanding this new climate is crucial to learning the lessons of the post-Yugoslav outcomes, which are much broader than the local or regional consequences. While taking place within regional borders, these events pose questions similar to those arising from the crisis of the European nation-state in the first half of the twentieth century, although the answers might be different.
The problem is thus not only that one is rendering irrelevant the past and the crimes committed in the name of something, someone, or someone's identity (N. Dimitrijevic, 2006a), or that such a "culture of silence" accompanied by an attempt at this kind of "forgetting" does not lead to oblivion but instead corroborates the wrong past (N. Dimitrijvic, 2006a). The crux of the problem is that these crimes are for the second time rendered into something righteous and are, accordingly, normalized. This cannot remain uninfluential, and goes along with the indifference of other communities less affected by the war and its crimes, but still somewhat involved, such as some of the more distanced post-Yugoslav states, which also continue to legitimize their nation-state policies on tribal-nationalist grounds. Furthermore, these crimes are only minimally reflected upon by the international community--although it is not solely a question of the direct perpetrators, victims, and immediately involved states, but also of global bystanders.
One might ask if the elements, patterns, and behaviors that have brought about violence, war, and collective crime in the past could simply have disappeared with the end of the regime and the war. However, they did survive and, though transformed, still influence the present and the future. While thinking about totalitarian domination in terms of elements, Hannah Arendt has warned that, even when a totalitarian regime has been defeated, there are elements of totalitarian solutions that can survive the system in the form of several temptations (Arendt, 1986: 459). She never thought that the new forms of these temptations would necessarily be "repetitions," having the same appearance, but she maintained that the elements of totalitarianism can either persist further or rise anew out of established democracy and crystallize in one or another new appearance.
ARENDT: RESPONSIBILITY, INNOCENCE, AND THE NATION-STATE
There are several points in Arendt's elaboration of the nation-state, citizenship, and political responsibility that are supportive of and helpful for my "tentative" understanding of post-Yugoslav developments and the phenomenon of "organized innocence." I shall briefly sketch some of these without going into a broad exegesis of Arendt's thought.
Arendt understood responsibility as being twofold. While rejecting collective guilt for what is today called "collective crime" and insisting on the strict individualization of guilt, she underlined collective (political) responsibility (Arendt, 2003a: 147) and differentiated it from personal responsibility. Guilt, as distinguished from collective responsibility, arises in response to a person's acts rather than intentions or potentialities, and thus cannot be collective, but necessarily singles out an individual (in court, for example). (1) Speaking of collective guilt today would thus, in her opinion, mean both an evasion of personal guilt and an omission of collective (political) responsibility, and could cause moral confusion ("Where all are guilty, nobody is") (Arendt, 2003a: 147). This, however, does not exclude the possibility of "organizing" the whole people into a condition of guilt, whereby, in order to be organized into such a condition, one must be ready to renounce one's own responsibility, be ready to subordinate oneself to the collective, to function, as it were, as a cog in the machine.
On the other hand, there exists a form of political and strictly collective responsibility that one can hardly escape, and one cannot renounce it insofar as one lives in some kind of community. It is connected to nonvoluntary belonging and has broader implications than the legal responsibility; it involves acting not only in relation to the law but in some cases--as the case of totalitarianism could teach us--also against the law, since compliance with the law can demand the commission of crime. Political responsibility has no necessary moral or juridical connotation but is closely connected to action; it is not founded on any prior moral standards but is strictly expressed in its performative character and eventual "greatness" (Vetlesen, 2005: 87; Herzog, 2004: 39; Honig, 1993: 87-89; Villa, 1996: 52-59). Political responsibility hence belongs to those virtues that are acquired by performance itself and does not take place if it is not enacted through agency (Vetlesen, 2005: 86, Herzog, 2004: 42). One of the main tasks of those who are trying to preserve political responsibility is therefore "to keep intact the powers of agency (of judging, thinking and acting)" (Vetlesen, 2005: 86).
For Arendt, there are rare exceptions where political (collective) responsibility no longer applies. There hardly exists any "innocence" in the political sense of a complete absence of responsibility. This has serious consequences for all the nonvoluntary members, citizens of those communities in the name of which problematic policies are implemented, not to mention those where crimes have been committed. Regardless of their accidentally belonging to a community, these individuals are, first,...
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