By SLAVEJ ŽIŽEK*
The mass protests taking place in Serbia suggest other possibilities. The protesters not only acknowledge that there is something rotten in the Serbian state; they also insist that the rot not continue.
Something important is happening in China, and it should concern the country's political leadership. Young Chinese are increasingly displaying an attitude of passive resignation, captured by the new fashionable expression, go away ('let it rot'). Born of economic disenchantment and widespread frustration with oppressive cultural norms, the go away rejects the rat race and encourages people to do only the bare minimum at work. Personal well-being takes precedence over career advancement.
The same trend is reflected in another recent buzzword: ping ping ('lying on one's back'), a neologism that denotes a feeling of resignation in the face of relentless social and professional competition. Both terms signal a rejection of social pressures to exceed expectations and of social engagement rendered as a game for fools with diminishing returns.
Last July, the CNN reported that many Chinese workers were swapping high-pressure office jobs for flexible blue-collar work. As one 27-year-old from Wuhan explained: 'I like cleaning. With the improvement of living standards (across the country), the demand for house cleaning services is also increasing… The change this brings is that my head is no longer dizzy. I feel less mental pressure. And I am full of energy every day.'
Such attitudes are presented as apolitical, rejecting both violent resistance to power and any dialogue with those in power. But are these the only options for the alienated?
The mass protests taking place in Serbia suggest other possibilities. The protesters not only acknowledge that there is something rotten in the Serbian state; they also insist that the rot not be allowed to continue.
The protests began last November in Novi Sad, following the roof collapse which left 15 dead and two seriously injured at a recently renovated railway station. Since then, demonstrations have spread to 200 Serbian cities and towns, attracting hundreds of thousands of people and making this the largest student-led movement in Europe since 1968.
Of course, the roof collapse was just the spark that lit the fuse of pent-up discontent. The protesters’ concerns span a range of issues, from rampant corruption and ecological destruction (the government plans to invest heavily in lithium mining) to the general contempt that Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić has shown for the people. What the government presents as a plan to seize global markets, young Serbs see as a ruse to cover up corruption, sell off national resources to foreign investors on murky terms, and phase out opposition media.
But what makes these demonstrations unique? The protesters’ refrain is: ‘We have no political demands and are keeping our distance from opposition parties. We simply ask that Serbian institutions work for the benefit of citizens.’ To this end, they are specifically insisting on transparency about the renovation of the Novi Sad railway station; access to all documents about the accident; the dropping of charges against those arrested during the first anti-government protest in November; and criminal charges against those who attacked student protesters in Belgrade.
The protesters thus want to short-circuit the process that has allowed the ruling party to hold the state hostage by controlling all institutions. For its part, the government of Aleksandar Vučić has reacted with violence, but also with a technique known in boxing as 'clinching': when a fighter wraps his arms around an opponent to prevent him from striking freely.
The more Aleksandar Vučić succumbs to panic, the more desperate he becomes to try to reach some kind of agreement with the protesters. But the protesters refuse any dialogue. They have specified their demands and are insisting on them unconditionally.
Traditionally, mass protests rely, at least implicitly, on the threat of violence, combined with an openness to negotiation. However, here we have the opposite: the Serbian protesters are not threatening violence, but they also reject dialogue. This simplicity causes confusion, as does the apparent absence of obvious leaders. In this strict sense, the protests have some similarities to the go away.
At some point, of course, organized politics will have to enter the game. But for now, the protesters’ ‘apolitical’ stance creates the conditions for a new politics, rather than another version of the same old game. To achieve law and order, the tables need to be cleared.
This is reason enough for the rest of the world to support the protests wholeheartedly. They prove that a simple, direct call for law and order can be more subversive than anarchic violence. Serbs want the rule of law without all the unwritten rules that leave the door open to corruption and authoritarianism.
The protesters are a far cry from the old anarchic left that dominated the 1968 demonstrations in Paris and across the West. After blocking a bridge over the Danube in Novi Sad for 24 hours, the young protesters decided to extend their protest for another three hours to clear the area. Can anyone imagine the stone-throwing Parisians of 1968 doing the same?
While some may see the politically motivated apoliticism of the Serbian protesters as hypocritical, it is better understood as a sign of their radicalism. They are refusing to play politics by the existing (mostly unwritten) rules. They are seeking fundamental changes in how basic institutions function.
The biggest hypocrite in this story is the European Union, which is refraining from putting any pressure on Aleksandar Vučić for fear that he will get closer to Russia. While the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, expressed support to the Georgian people ‘fighting for democracy’, it has remained remarkably silent on the uprising in Serbia – a country that has officially been a candidate for EU membership since 2012. The EU is letting Aleksandar Vučić have his way because he has promised stability and exports of lithium, a crucial input for electric vehicles.
The lack of criticism from the European Union, even in the face of allegations of electoral fraud, has repeatedly left Serbian civil society adrift. Should we be surprised that there are so few EU flags being waved by protesters? The idea of a ‘colour revolution’ of the kind that emerged in Ukraine 20 years ago to ‘join the democratic West’ no longer holds any appeal. The European Union has hit another political low.
*Slavoj Žižek, professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School, he is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London. Author, among other books, of In defense of lost causes (boitempo). [https://amzn.to/46TCc6V]
Translation: Nikola Matevski.
Originally published on the portal Project syndicate.
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