How to (de)mobilise citizens- an interview with Chip Gagnon

Interview with Chip Gagnon conducted by Gezim Krasniqi and Igor Stiks.

Stiks: It is maybe important that you go back to the main argument of your book ‘The myth of ethnic war’. The wars in former Yugoslavia or what was happening there were too often portrayed as interethnic conflict, ethnic war, or something deeply related to ethnicity. You went against this current.

Gagnon: First of all, the title is a bit of an exaggeration. I’m not saying that ethnicity is non-existent or that it didn’t have anything to do with the wars, but it was definitely not the main motivating factor. As I was finishing my dissertation on a different topic, Yugoslav-Soviet relations, the wars were starting to heat up. I was living in New York and I would go down to the newsstand at Times Square where you could buy all the newspapers and magazines from the former Yugoslavia. What I was reading in the local press was very different from what was being reported in the US, which was mainly focussed on ethnic conflict; the New York Times being one of the most egregious sources. For example, there was one article about Vukovar with the headline ‘Ancient Ethnic Hatred’, while the content of the article showed the exact opposite to be the case, which was bizarre. Soon thereafter Robert Kaplan published his bestseller ‘Balkan Ghosts’. What they were reporting was very different from what I had experienced in Yugoslavia and from what I was reading. So the argument basically is this is not ancient ethnic hatreds. It’s not like these people were just waiting to kill each other, which was the image you were getting from the Western press.  

I start the book with some anecdotes. One of them being, they call up men in Belgrade to go fight in the war in Croatia, and a very high rate – between 50-80% –of guys just leave, desert, hide, or go abroad. That does not fit the perception, the preconceptions that people in this country [the US] had about Serbs for example. And then I look at sociological and political science polling from the 1980s that show that ethnic distance was not what you would expect if it was the cause of this violence, especially in the places that were the most violent, where you had higher levels of positive co-existence and higher levels of intermarriage. So, then I say, “Well if that’s not what it is, then what is it?”

Stiks: You went back in history to find the answer.

Gagnon: Yes, I went to the history of conflict within the League of Communists, between reformers and conservatives going back to the 1960s. I show how conservative forces in the League of Communists were threatened by reformist trends and how in Yugoslavia, starting in the early 1980s after Tito died, you have this crisis. There was this huge debate about how to go forward in Yugoslavia. The reformers were really coming out on top in their arguments. So, of course, the conservatives felt rather threatened. I focussed first on Serbia because Serbia was the largest republic and most important in many ways, as well as the most divided: you had on the one hand a part of Serbia, the industrialised part, the more developed part, like Vojvodina whose leadership was for the reforms, whereas in other parts of Serbia there were areas and regions that would not necessarily come out on top. So I focussed on Milosevic, not just him as an individual but also on him representing part of the League of Communists, and I followed that kind of conflict which I think people are probably very familiar with.

The problem of course is that his strategy was first to take over the Serbian party, which he succeeded in doing, but Serbia is only one out of eight federal units. So the issue is, since Yugoslavia is a federation, you have the danger of reformers prevailing at the federal level and so this is where he, I guess you can say, hijacks what became the anti-bureaucratic revolution that concerns Serbs and Kosovo and manages to take over the leaderships of Vojvodina and Montenegro. He puts his own people in Kosovo and you end up with a four against four vote in the Yugoslav presidency.

Unfortunately for him, what happens in 1989 in the rest of Eastern Europe changes things, because before that it could have been possible to recentralise all of Yugoslavia using the communist party. In early 1990 the elections happened in Slovenia and Croatia, the communist party was no longer running the show and clearly the strategy had been to rely on a sort of democratic centralism. So at this point, in June of 1990, he had a conversation with the army chief Veljko Kadijevic and the Serbian member of the Presidency Borisav Jovic and he was advised to kick Croatia and Slovenia out of Yugoslavia. And this is when you actually see the beginnings of the violence in what later became Krajina in Croatia.

At the same time, back in Serbia people were not so happy with Milosevic. In March 1991 during the massive demonstrations it really looked like Milosevic and his Socialist Party were going to be out. At that exact same time things started to heat up in Croatia. So you see that happen again in ’92 in Bosnia and again in ‘96/97 in Kosovo. This is a partial explanation for the war, but I feel the elite story was the one that was not being told. I think it’s a really important story and without that story you cannot understand what happened. So conservative elites feel threatened, they shift attention towards a threat and provoke conflict. By July, late summer of 1991, Milosevic is no longer threatened by massive demonstrations because the whole thing has shifted towards these external threats. I would add that Tudjman did very similar things in ’91, and in ’93 and ‘94 in Bosnia, and then in ’95 with the retaking of Krajina. A very similar kind of strategy.

Stiks: You talk in your book about strategies of mobilisation and de-mobilisation of citizens and for those of us interested in citizenship this is quite an important perspective. When do you mobilise citizens and for what? And when is there the moment when mobilised citizens should be demobilised?

Gagnon: Regarding the concept of demobilisation, it referred to situations where people were being politically mobilised, for example, in March ’91, and in the winter of ‘96/’97 in all of the cities in Serbia. Now if you’re in an elite and your population is mobilising against you, you’re going to feel threatened, so what do you do? One strategy is to call up the troops to put down the masses, but that doesn’t always work. It didn’t work in Belgrade. Another strategy is to demobilise, but how do you get people to get off the street, how do you prevent them from coming out? And the strategy that was used in the former Yugoslavia was the one that I mentioned where you shift the subject towards an external threat. Not every group of elites has the ability to demobilise though. If you look at Czechoslovakia, there was not really an option in 1989 for the communist party in Czechoslovakia to do anything other than give up. In Yugoslavia elites did have other options because they were not seen as merely imposed by the Soviets because of the history of the Yugoslav communist party. They had an ability to maintain a kind of legitimacy while they were shifting attention.

Krasniqi: Do you see any connections between the political demobilisation of citizens and the weak civil societies in the successor states of Yugoslavia today?

Gagnon: One of the really impressive things about Yugoslavia in the 1980s was the degree of political mobilisation throughout the area. There was civil society, they might have not have had NGOs the way they exist now but there were grassroots movements. People organised, people demonstrated. It takes a lot of organisation to get the kinds of protests that we saw in Serbia, for example, or the Sarajevo anti-war protests in 1992. So the very fact that citizens were mobilising was incredibly threatening to the elites. The demobilisation strategy takes a lot of work though, but it is really not a long-term strategy. It’s a short-term strategy and in both Croatia and Serbia it bought time for the elites to shift their basis of power. By 2000 Tudjman’s party (HDZ) was out of power but by then it didn’t matter any more. It wasn’t the party that determined who had power, because by then power was defined more as capital, in the sense of who owns what, and the HDZ people own a lot thanks to HDZ holding power in the 1990s. If another party comes to power, it’s not as much of a threat as it would have been in the 1990s. The same thing happened in Serbia. With Milosevic in power, the people who had power to deal with the opposition made sure that they wouldn’t lose their power. And because the structure of power had shifted towards private ownership, it was not as much of a threat when the party and Milosevic were finally out of power.

Krasniqi: Earlier you mentioned the shifting of the power base as a result of the transition from socialism to democracy, as it was called at the time in Yugoslavia. When we talk about the power base and the role and position of citizens within this power base, can we really speak of a process of transition of power base from the party apparatus to citizens, in the post-Yugoslav area?

Gagnon: No, it was a transition from socialism to capitalism. I think it’s important to understand this point in a larger picture. As Americans, do we have power? Well, we think we do, but really, what is democracy? I think demobilisation is an important strategy in any liberal democracy, and in the US one of the main ways that power remains pretty much untouched is through demobilisation strategies. In the US people are demobilised in many different ways. For example, cynicism towards politics. So, although Obama did mobilise people, the reality is that people get demobilised after voting, because we’re not going to challenge the power structures and, obviously, in the US the ideological hegemony is so strong. You can look at what Bush did using 9/11. This is a common tactic throughout US history- foreign policy is used as a really strong de-mobiliser in this country. During the Cold War, the image of the Soviet threat and communism was effectively used to demobilise the left. You can think about Roosevelt and the New Deal and how that really mobilised, in a really strong way, very progressive policies that were unprecedented in this country. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that World War II ends and suddenly you have this Red Scare. I really do think it was constructed in a way purposely to discredit and demobilise leftist forces. And then Reagan comes in and does the same thing. The danger after the fall of the Soviet Union was “Ok, what do we do now?”. 9/11 in that sense was the answer to that question and so we saw how Bush got all kinds of things through in terms of civil liberties and Obama, unfortunately, is pursuing the same kinds of strategies and policies that Bush did.

Stiks: Recently we have seen a renewal in citizens’ mobilisation and even an emergence of a new left in places such as Croatia, or, for instance, the events in Greece where people were hugely mobilised over the social agenda. What is your take on that?

Gagnon: Croatia is interesting because if you look at the social science polling about people’s policy preferences, they don’t really change in Croatia from the 1980s through the 1990s. You have the nationalist movement but people still want a sort of social democratic system that has all the positive parts of socialism. You can still see that people there are sort of demobilised for a while. But I think it’s not a coincidence that politics is normalised a little bit and politicians are no longer using aggressive demobilisation strategies that rely on conflict and violence and the portraying of others as enemies, maybe partly because they want to get into the EU. You’re going to see these kind of movements and protest against neo-liberal policies that in the US people take for granted. I think there are still different expectations, even among younger generations in the former Yugoslavia, because of their parents’ values. I don’t think it’s surprising that there would be resistance to this rather than people just saying “Oh yes, this is the way the world works”, because it’s not.