Serbia definitely has lower social standard than U.S. and Italy, and social rebellion in these countries is still more evident than here. The latest wave of protest under the slogan “Let’s occupy Wall Street” has just started in the United States.
There are several factors that influence this fact. There is widespread perception in sociology that riots and protests do not come as a result of the absolute poor living conditions, but are rather encouraged by the deterioration of living conditions in comparison to the earlier situation. If you had a better life somewhere, and begin to live poorer, it is more likely to provoke protests and riots then just continuous poor living conditions. Therefore, we are speaking of unfulfilled hopes and expectations.
We should also keep in mind that poor living conditions force us to concentrate more energy on survival, and there is not much of it left for protests. The poor conditions also divide the society and everyone takes care of himself, people turn to individual rather than collective strategies. We have a kind of collective protest fatigue, resulting from nearly 20 years of a kind of negative history.
Of course, there is also the problem of organization. To actually start a protest, you need an organizational structure or a spontaneous creative energy, which did not happen here. The unions and parties that claim social issues are their priority are not ready to organize protests, and there is no other spontaneously formed new organization that would have the initiative.
But there were no organizational problems when right wing supporters threatened to prevent the Pride Parade and police have practically confirmed their power by banning the event.
Speaking of the far-right organizations, we should bear in mind that this is a group with a developed structure. These include the right-wing groups and supporters’ groups. They have developed both mobilizational and organizational structure, they are easy to trigger and control. But these are mainly directed protests of limited duration, as it was the attempt to prevent the manifestation of LGBT organizations.
We have also socially motivated movements and protests, but they are also targeted the short-termed. We had serious protests over unpaid wages, the closure of some companies, the purchase prices of agricultural products, and some of them were pretty tough. But, these protests have remained isolated and brought only limited results.
In fact, Serbia has never had a horizontal connection of social movements, we always had political movements led by already prepared parties. They aimed at power control and the basic mechanism was a national mobilization. In the past 20 years, we have not had a mobilization on a social platform. Any attempt to do so ended up in a failure.
Why things could not take a different course?
We actually did not have the tradition of a trade union movement which would be autonomous in relation to the political one. We have not had one either before socialism, before the First and Second World War. We had mostly incompetent union leadership, we had no leaders in trade unions that would be able to organize the movement. And the union leaders were devoted to limited interests and struggle for power.
Generally speaking, Serbia has no tradition of horizontal connections in some typical urban forms, such as local action. Here you cannot even organize tenants in a building to do something for their own good and to improve the common living conditions.
Are there any indications that things could change and social movements can become more important?
There are no indications that any serious social movement could be started and spread here, unless there is a radical social and political crisis. Particularly dangerous is the fact that this situation can be used by right-wing parties and organizations ready to implement a political rhetoric and lead the country into a kind of emergency. Right-wing options are more organized to take over the control in the case of political collapse than the movements based on social principles.
In such situation, civil debate on how we had enough of ineffective Democratic leaning parties can be very dangerous because it encourages inactivity. It is true that we have the inactive parties, but criticism of their work is somehow always lost in laments.
Can it be concluded that the ultra right wing is much better organized than the so-called civic movements and is Serbian society threatened by serious danger from it?
Radical right-wing can be a menace to society in the case of appearance of a more developed political organization that could mobilize this wing in the increased economic and social conditions.
The occupation of Wall Street and Serbia