THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY

IN EASTERN EUROPE: A CHALLENGE

FOR THE 90s

Julie Mostov

We are more or less familiar with the abuse of historical facts to propagate certain
ideas and to justify certain actions, including acts of violence and vengeance
toward those whose ancestors have harmed “ours.” History is used to build
collective memories and national communities and to reveal errors and crimes in
the collective past. It is also used to deconstruct the notion of “a common past”
and to create the conditions for more inclusive, tolerant, and heterogenous
futures. Thus, we see historians writing people back into public histories, and
others seeking to write people out of what was once their collective past. It is the
latter “historians” – academics, writers, journalists, and politicians – engaged in
what Katherine Verdery calls a “homogenizing, differentiating, or classifying
discourse,”1 filled with romantic visions of national glory, myths of heroism and
martyrdom, with whom I am concerned here.
Public displays of national symbols, euphoric participation in mass meetings,
and celebrations of cultural uniqueness and spiritual superiority have emerged in
varying degrees as common features of the political and cultural life in Eastern
Europe in the late 1980s and early 90s.2 These visions of past greatness have
served to provide some “inspiration and consolation” to people suddenly faced
with challenges of radical social and political change, confusion, uncertainty, and
the stigma of being poor, backward cousins in the European family. Yet, these
histories have also provided the foundation for ethnonational programs, resources
for competing national elites, and justifications for discrimination, territorial
aggression, and war. They have become a source of resistance to liberal values
and institutions linked to contemporary processes of democratization and
economic development.
Whether liberal-based theories are desirable or reasonable frameworks for the
societies developing in Eastern Europe today is an open question.3 The point of
this work, however, is to explore the ready source of tension between expressed
aspirations for political and economic reform and romantic appropriations of the
past. Understanding the dimensions of this conflict is essential to meeting the
challenges of the 90s in the region.
I am particularly concerned with the use and abuse of history in the develop-
ment of theoretical concepts and political institutions, that is, with the ways in

Constellations Volume 4, No 3, 1998. © Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
 The Use and Abuse of History: Julie Mostov 377

which strategies of “nation-building”4 bolstered by historical “truths,” partial

memories, and stories of glorious pasts justify certain political ideas, claims, and
practices. I am especially interested in the ways in which descriptions of the
primordial nature of the nation, “organic formulae of life,” and “ontological root-
edness”5 conflict with the development of liberal values and institutions. I argue
that the political concepts which develop with this approach to history serve to
undermine not only democratic institutions but also conditions for peace and
security in the region. In doing so, I attempt to examine not how actors have used
their role as public historians to pursue narrow nationalist interests, or have
abused historical documents, myths, and instruments of collective memory, but
rather how a particular kind of historicizing can obstruct political institutions that
promote tolerance, gender equality, and democratic society.

The Nation as a Natural Community

In order to establish themselves as the guardians of national interests, as uniquely
capable of understanding and promoting these interests, ethnocratic leaders must
craft the Nation, a project which engages a number of actors and draws on history,
myth, culture, and real existential concerns. Historians and writers revive epic
traditions, poems, and heroes, glorifying the past and supporting territorial
claims. Archaeologists engage in nineteenth-century debates, turning their atten-
tion to genealogical studies, digging up graves, and examining bones from
Greece, Macedonia, Serbia and Slovenia to Hungary and Romania.6 New words
or, precisely, old words, have been reintroduced into everyday vocabulary
through the media, in order to evoke certain traditional images and values.
Popular use of these words (such as “hearth”) allow leaders to talk easily about
things like sacrifice, fighting to the death, protecting our homeland, and expelling
invaders.
National mythologies provide a renewed sense of identity for people, particu-
larly for those who feel they were denied their particular religious or cultural
identity by the old regime or other national groups. In the face of confusion, insta-
bility, and abrupt change, a richly embroidered national identity provides a sense
of historical continuity and deep historical roots. These tales have historical foun-
dations, but often enjoy a number of embellishments and suffer from gaps where
the histories of others are left out or distorted. Still, their historical grounding
gives them credence and power, especially in the hands of historians, who use
their training, knowledge, and access to archives and rare documents to give them
a certitude and legitimacy hard for any lay person to dispute. Faced with
economic and political conditions which threaten a loss of status, few people are
disposed to question the newly found importance, pride, and identity of this
historical legacy.
These stories, which provide people with a renewed national heritage, recreate the
world views of their historic peoples, and reestablish values and virtues particular to

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378 Constellations Volume 4, Number 3, 1998

their national character, simultaneously, create dichotomies in which others are

excluded as antithetical to these world views, as enemies of these traditions, and
corrupters of these values and virtues. Every setback in the national history can
be attributed to confrontation with or mistreatment by the others.
Efforts to “recover” the nation, which stress its ancient roots, historical conti-
nuity, and naturalness, reject the notion of the nation as a modern political
community or “imagined” cultural community. They trace the nation’s roots to an
ancient past in which cultural values were pure and the “natural” character of a
people, undiluted. This ancient past provides the grounding for political practices
and, importantly, desired social institutions and political arrangements.
Theoretical justifications are drawn from the primordial character of the commu-
nity, its natural character, which ought to be recovered and preserved in our
collective memory. The nation achieves the status of being “timeless” and
“changeless,” which makes it possible for theorists or leaders to ignore the “situ-
ated” nature and context of political concepts and policies.7
This notion of the nation, embedded in myths of primordial roots, does not
necessarily create an obstacle to the development of modern political institutions,
nor to the peace and security in the region. Yet, the appeal to the historical nation
supports patriarchal and authoritarian understandings of community, which
enable national leaders to consolidate their power and define the interests of the
nation independently of actual expressions of interest articulated by citizens
through regular processes of social choice. The potential here for political repres-
sion, exclusionary policies, and various forms of coercion is significant.
This appeal to the past rejects assumptions of liberal theory: particularly,
notions of individual autonomy, moral individualism or rational agency, and the
notion of community as artifice. Liberal theories typically derive their principles
either from descriptions of a hypothetical state of nature and rules of governance
which follow from this “natural condition” or notions of social cooperation driven
by desires to maximize happiness and minimize pain. Liberal theories of differ-
ent sorts recognize the idea of political communities as human constructions that
have their concrete origins in particular historical conditions. They are normally
associated with the development of markets, free labor, and some form of govern-
ment selected by members of the community, limited by the terms of association
and rules or purpose of governance to which the members of the community have
agreed or could agree in some fashion. The stability and continuity of political
communities depend upon the consensus or, at least, tacit agreement of their
members. The nation emerges as a community of people sharing in a common
past and a commitment to shared norms, laws, and expectations for the future.
Accordingly, nations are not “objective facts,” but rather as Renan suggests, the
result of a “daily plebiscite.”8
This notion is at odds with nation-building strategies or visions of the nation,
which figure in the defense of ethnocratic policies or programs, based on the
primordial nature of the nation. The nation is a natural community and its political

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 The Use and Abuse of History: Julie Mostov 379

organization flows from its essential characteristics. Those political or economic

institutions and practices which upset the continuity and unity of the national
community and challenge its unique values are to be rejected as foreign and
destructive, aimed at the very extinction of the nation. According to G. M. Tamas,
the resistance to liberal democracy rests on one ethical argument alone, “namely
that liberal democracy is alien.”9 The existence of the nation is threatened by the
artificial constructions of the liberal (or, for that matter, socialist) state.
This may appear confusing, given the historically linked development of liber-
alism and nationalism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century in Europe.
However, this linkage is based upon an understanding of the nation as a modern
construct and the product of historical development, not as a community of
“blood and soil.” It is the identification of the nation as natural and timeless, as a
primordial community, in which “historians” or national spokespersons empha-
size original claims to land and genetic and spiritual continuity that is in conflict
with the basic assumptions of liberalism.
Identification with and loyalty to the nation does not involve the “voluntarism”
of a “daily plebiscite,” but acceptance of the obligations of belonging and the
mission of the nation as articulated by its guardians. Tismaneanu and Pavel note
how reverence for organic notions of the nation and yearning for a romantic,
agrarian community, that has recovered its “genuine self,” support radical right-
wing attacks on liberalism and authoritarian populism.10 Adoration of the nation
and its leaders, contraints on parliamentary democracy and an independent press,
and revival of traditional gender roles become acceptable forms of recovering the
nation.
These themes get played out through a number of binary oppositions: authen-
tic-artificial; rural-urban; East-West; Orthodox-Catholic (or Christendom-Islam);
community-society; and nation-citizen. Cities are seen as sites of discontinuity,
rationalization, and modernization: all that is “foreign” and “impure.”11 Cities are
sites of revolution; resistance to authority, patriarchal hierarchies, and traditional
values; and home to an independent citizenry. Glorification of the authentic, rural
community of the nation and rejection of artificial, contaminated, urban centers
translate into a rejection of “Western” values, institutions and practices. This
conveniently allows ethnocrats to ignore internationally recognized human and
civil rights and reject charges of violations of international law. Finally, these
themes find their way into violent acts against the symbols of “foreign” values,
and against the city itself.

Ethnic Democracy and Freedom from Others

Liberal institutions have their limits. Given the many criticisms of liberalism
today, one could easily say that the unique history and culture of respective coun-
tries ought not to be discarded for a set of institutions based on questionable arti-
ficial constructions or “unrooted, independent choosers” and hypothetical states

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of nature. On the other hand, it is not unreasonable for many to seek the protec-
tions that these institutions might provide. Those groups or individuals not linked
to the community through the ancient genetic chain of the nation, that is, “root-
less, cosmopolitans” (often synonymous for Jews), have regularly been attacked
as strawmen by East-Central European nationalists, as “alien” threats to the purity
and strength of the nation. It is the abuse of these organic notions of the nation by
ethnocrats that produces policies that violate the rights of others, relegate
members of minority groups to second class status, encourage assimilation, and
advocate ethnonationally based demographic policies, violence, and aggression.
The organic notions themselves, however, facilitate this abuse. Without internal
checks on such abuse, the rejection of liberal procedural constraints is potentially
dangerous.
Writing others out of history allows the development of concepts like democ-
racy within ethnically defined boundaries and the articulation of the right of
national self-determination without concern for the consequences of this claim for
those who are not members of the majority/dominant nation. Writing Serbs out of
Croatian history, retold with emphasis on a thousand years of oppression by
outsiders, supports not only the expulsion of people (Serbs) who have lived there
for centuries or, at best, their oppressive assimilation, but also authoritarian,
repressive political institutions in Croatia.12
This is seen even more clearly in the case of Kosovo. The whole development
of the political strategies of ethnocrats in Serbia has revolved around the battle of
Kosovo (1389).13 Its elaborate mythology, cults of heroism, suffering and martyr-
dom – supported by the intellectual authority and political activism of academic
historians and writers – paved the way for a politics in which the culture, strug-
gles and historic contributions of the majority Albanian population have been
reduced to a story of demographic assault, political oppression, and violence
against the Serbian nation.14 The Kosovo legend with its romantic elements of
heroism and sacrifice became a unifying motif, which could turn a “defeated”
population into a defiant Nation. The power of this story of tragedy, heroism, 600
years of demographic changes, perceived violations of Serbian sovereignty
(particularly, with the establishment of Kosovo as an autonomous federal entity
in the 1974 constitution), and undercurrents of ethnic tensions among local Serbs
and Albanians have served to justify the declaration of a police state, suspension
of civil liberties, and gross violations of human rights. The ease with which
“historians” have moved between the everyday world of politics and economics
and the otherworldly spheres of heroes, sacred spaces, warriors, martyrs, and trai-
tors has helped to confirm the natural character of authoritarian rule and patriar-
chal values, the necessity of ethnically defined boundaries for any future
democratic state, and the inevitability of population changes (including “ethnic
cleansing”).15
The notion of freedom which follows from these histories is one of freedom
from historical oppressors – the Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian empires, Nazis,

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 The Use and Abuse of History: Julie Mostov 381

Ustashe, Chetniks, Communists, “Tito’s Yugoslavia,” “Serb-dominated”

Yugoslavia, etc. – and not freedom from the triumphant new state. Thus, censor-
ship, which was a central preoccupation of many of the current guardians of the
respective national cultures under the old regime, no longer finds its way into
their discussions. Civil liberties seem no longer to concern them, particularly
those liberties which support political opposition, difference, and freedom of
conscience and expression.16 These positions are often justified by returning to the
traditional political forms unique to the nation and by reiterating the alien nature
of liberal or Western concepts of political association and citizenship.
Thus, for example, Bosnian Serb nationalists argued in defense of their
destruction of cities, mosques, museums, and other symbols of multicultural
social life that they sought “to destroy society in order to restore community.”
Rejecting the compatibility of civil society and this organic community, a
Bosnian Serb leader lamented: “they want to make Serbs into citizens,” that is, to
replace the essential being of a member of the nation with an enervated “empty”
civic personality.17

Nation vs. Citizen

Consider the potential conflict between historical appeals to the nation and
notions of equality and reciprocity basic to republican citizenship. Citizens share
in sovereign authority and enjoy a kind of equality: equal rights and obligations.18
This idea, basic to civil or republican constitutionalism19 provides a basis for
respect for the law and acceptance of civic duties. It is the generality of the terms
of political association implied in this compact that preserves the equality and
independence of citizens. Laws apply to no one in particular: they come from all
and apply to all.20 It is this character of generality that preserves access for
members21 of the community to the complex of rights and duties that pertain to
government and participation in public life. It provides a basis for the rule of law
and certain expectations of reciprocity, that is, mutual respect and fair play. When
particular interests define the contours of citizenship, the stage is set for relation-
ships of dependence and differentiated rights and duties.
When citizenship is closely linked to identification with a particular ethnona-
tional group and to the realization of its goals, political rights are defined by the
particular commitments, values, and interests of the ethnonation. Citizenship
loses its general legal character. The criteria for recognition and exclusion
become particular judgments. This is a danger posed by the language introduced
into the constitutions of many of the new or reestablished countries in East
Europe and the former Soviet Union, language which registers these fundamental
laws as the realization of a long-held national dream or goal and a national home-
land.22
States in which numbers of the population do not feel secure in their equal rights
as citizens or do not enjoy the rights of citizenship are states that are likely candi-

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dates for internal conflict and authoritarian government. Indeed, the presence of a
large number of people systematically disadvantaged by the terms of association
creates social conditions under which rulers may succeed in justifying the further
curtailment of civil liberties and the institution of a police state.23
Theories of citizenship generally include assumptions about political compe-
tency: the rights and obligations of citizenship follow from recognized capacities
for deliberation or judgment.24 While democratic theories of citizenship extend
the ranks of these capable subjects as broadly as possible, arguments for exclud-
ing people from citizenship are concerned with contracting the boundaries of
competency. Proponents engage in claims about “innate aptitudes” for citizenship
or culturally grounded reasons for diminished capacity. Individuals are excluded
based on their deficient aptitude for citizenship, deficiencies of judgments or lack
of feeling for shared values and interests. Arguments of this kind are not new to
us, nor are their damaging effects.25
Recognition of competency or capacity for judgment provides the institutional
status from which individuals address the government and other citizens and
make claims about rights. Under the past communist regimes in Eastern Europe,
the assumption of autonomous judgment implicit in the notion of citizenship was
more or less absent. People enjoyed the status of citizen through membership in
a collective in which sharing in an externally defined set of interests and enjoy-
ing certain social rights replaced the enjoyment of civil and political rights.
Maintaining these collective identities through increasingly meaningless slogans
as, for example, “bratstvo i jedinstvo” (brotherhood and unity) in the former
Yugoslavia and elaborate public celebrations of these slogans undermined the
democratic potential for solidarity expressed by them.26 With the breakdown of
these regimes and the construction of new ones, the notion of democratic citizen-
ship has been voiced frequently, but the assumption that individuals have the
capacity to make choices and render independent judgments about public life has
remained basically at the level of rhetoric. It has come up against the old model
of citizenship, or membership in a collective body, which itself is the object,
rather than the subject of law.27
The scope of political rights may appear extended, but the deception is only to
the outside. Where ethnocracy prevails, the obligations of citizenship remain
defined in terms of loyalty and identification and not in terms of sound delibera-
tion. The “active” citizen participates in reaffirming ethnonationally defined
interests, but does not exercise judgment.28
Ideally, political participation ought to provide a kind of civic identity and alle-
giances necessary for political stability and limited political coercion.29 Not all
public roles, however, support this identity. Indeed, the “spontaneous” awakening
of a people to national glory and roles defined by primordial myths or long-held
national dreams serve to reinforce a different sense of public self.
“The consciousness of common interest is citizenship.”30 Without the social
bonds of citizenship, according to Rousseau, the corporate spirit of the magis-

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 The Use and Abuse of History: Julie Mostov 383

trates would continually assert itself. Thus, would-be national leaders wary of
potential opposition must prevent the crowd from becoming a body of citizens.31
They need to prevent the establishment of these social bonds and create bound-
aries between those with the “aptitude” for citizenship and those without this
capacity. In the politics of national identity this means constructing boundaries
based on claims about the “genetic” or cultural deficiencies of some peoples or
groups and their inability or refusal to promote the shared understandings of the
community.

Some Thoughts in Conclusion

The abuse of history in the construction and justification of political concepts is
a conscious use of myths and legends and desires to be part of a “heavenly
people,” a unique historical nation, or a secure community. Juxtaposing the alien,
urban, dangerous, and contaminated with the familiar, rural, safe, and pure,
guardians of national values can reject uncertain political processes and consoli-
date their power in traditional authoritarian modes of political control. The conti-
nuity of the primordial nation does not need to be questioned through legitimating
processes in which individuals accept the terms of association. Those who reject
the positions of leaders are not merely members of a parliamentary or political
opposition, but opponents of the nation, self-interested individuals, traitors, and
self-haters.
The fact that this organic notion of the nation is a part of the culture and history
of the region does not mean that its abuse is inevitable. Culture and history invite
many readings. Expressions of ethnic/national identity need not be articulated or
justified in terms of claims of continuity and age-old bonds to the soil. Yet the
potential for this speaks to special concerns in the construction of political
concepts32 and in the use of notions of collective salvation and memories to justify
particular ethnonational paths to democracy, or its rejection altogether.

NOTES
1. Katherine Verdery, “Whither ‘Nation’ and ‘Nationalism‘?” Daedalus 122:3 (Summer 1993):
38.
2. “. . . public fascination with national history, especially with a faraway, often mythical, past
as a guide to future action, is hardly a Hungarian monopoly! Rather such fascination is common to
East Central Europe as a whole.” The author notes that while this may be good for historians, it
would be better to put greater trust in bankers, stock market analysts, and technicians, and less
reliance on historians: “For even if inspired historians have used history not to inflame nationalist
passions but to illuminate errors and crimes of the past, a good part of the public has preferred to
identify with those historians whose main goal has been to incite hostility toward outsiders, minori-
ties, and aliens.” Istvan Deak, “Historiography of the Countries of Eastern Europe: Hungary,”
American Historical Review (October 1992): 1042.
3. Julie Mostov, “Democracy and the Politics of National Identity,” Studies in East European
Thought 46 (June 1994): 9–31.
4. Verdery defines nation-building as “the production of a community imagined as a single body

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384 Constellations Volume 4, Number 3, 1998
(ideally contained within actual or possible state borders)” and state-building as “the building of
organizational and institutional structures and arenas, related to governance within fixed borders
and to interactions across them.” Katherine Verdery, “The Production and Defense of ‘the
Romanian Nation’ 1900 to World War II,” in Richard G. Fox, ed. Nationalist Ideologies and the
Production of National Cultures (American Ethnological Society Monograph Series, Number 2,
1990), 82. See also, Julie Mostov, “Democracy and the Politics of National Identity.”
5. In speaking of the interwar Generation of nationalist writers in Romania, who have become
models for contemporary national intellectuals, Tismaneanu and Pavel write: “The Generation’s
anti-democratism was not necessarily one of ignorance or incompetence, but the result of informed
choices. Like Ernst Junger, Carl Schmitt, or Martin Heidegger, they saw capitalism as intrinsically
alien to the organic formulae of life and ontological rootedness. . . . Then, as now, an obsessional
theme was that Romania’s destiny cannot be accomplished within democratic-parliamentary forms,
but rather in the reconstituting of the original bonds of solidarity of the agrarian-pastoral world.”
Vladimir Tismaneanu and Dan Pavel, “Romania’s Mystical Revolutionaries: The Generation of
Angst and Adventure Revisited,” East European Politics and Societies 8:3 (Fall 1994): 422–423.
6. See, Boz̆idar Slaps̆ak, “Postmodernism, amateurism and politics: the changing past in a soci-
ety in change,” Journal of European Archaeology 2 (1993): 5–8.
7. According to Tismaneanu, “The main point about the current recuperation of the Generation
is that the contemporary worshipers are attracted to, and exploit for their own purposes, the radi-
calism [of the figures of this movement]. This ‘annexation’ often means the deliberate neglect of
the historical context, a willing de-contextualization of the Generation’s ideas,” 438.
8. Sanjayu Seth, “Political Theory in the Age of Nationalism,” Ethics and International Affairs
7 (1993): 83. While Renan uses the vocabularly of shared sacrifices, suffering, and heroic battles,
he recognizes the participation of individuals in continually constituting the “nation.”
9. G. M. Tamas, “Socialism, Capitalism, and Modernity,” Journal of Democracy 3:3 (July
1992): 73. Tamas notes the “anti-modern component” of the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe:
“Eastern Europe’s plebeian new right . . . is afraid of capitalism and liberal democracy,” Ibid., 70.
10. Tismaneanu and Pavel, 438. See also, Nebojs̆a Popov on Serbian populism, “Srpski
Populizam: Od Marginalne do Dominantne Pojave,” Vreme (separate) 135 (May 24, 1993).
11. Sretan Vujović, “Stereotipi o gradu, nacionalizam i rat,” Republika I (April 1995): 1–12.
Also, Bogdan Bogdanović, Grad i smrt (Belgrade: Beogradski krug, 1994); Ivan C̆olović, Pucanja
od Zdravlja (Beogradski krug, 1994); and Slobodan Naumović, “Rise Peasant, Rise My Kin:
Peasant Symbolism and Political Community in Recent Serbian History,” Annual of Serbian
History II: 1 (Belgrade, 1995): 39–63.
12. Vesna Pusić, “Dictatorships with Democratic Legitimacy: Democracy versus Nation,” East
European Politics and Societies 8:3 (Fall 1994): 383–401.
13. Olga Zirojević, “Kosovo u istorijskom pamćenju: mit legende, ćinjenice,” Republika (March
1995): 9–24.
14. This process is striking in the declarations and commentaries of members of the Serbian
Academy of Science and Arts (SANU) from the middle 1980’s through 1992 and the Serbian
Writers Association. See, Olivera Milosavljević, “Upotreba autoriteta nauke: Javna politic̆ka delat-
nost Srpska akademije nauka i umetnosti (1986–1992),” Republika (June 1995), 1–30; and Drinka
Gojković, “Trauma bez katarze: Udruz̆enje knjiz̆evnika Srbije – Radjanje nacionalizma iz duha
demokratije,” Republika (June 1995): 1–16.
15. At the same time, the expectation of an eventually “pure” national state makes it relatively
easy for ethnocrats to accept European Community-mandated conventions on minority rights.
16. Drinka Gojković, “Trauma bez katarze,” 5, 10–11.
17. Note the following quotes: “Serbs have finally been deprived of their Serb name, they have
been made citizens, which they will not accept.” Miroslav Toholj, a leader of the Serb Democratic
Party in Bosnia-Herzegovina, as quoted in Vreme (Belgrade) 9 March 1992, p. 54; and “Serbia shall
not be the state of equal citizens, but the state of Serbs and loyal citizens,” Borba 23 April 1993, p.
13. Statement by Sinis̆a Vućinić, the leader of a militant pro-regime rightist group in Serbia, in
Vojin Dimitrijević, “The Minority Malaise in Post Communist Europe,” 16, n3.

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 The Use and Abuse of History: Julie Mostov 385

18. According to Rousseau, for example, “the social compact sets up among citizens an equality
of such a kind, that they all bind themselves to observe the same conditions and should therefore all
enjoy the same rights.” Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses (London: Dent,
1973), 188.
19. Ibid.; also, for example, see Kant, “External (rightful) equality in a nation . . . is that relation
among citizens whereby no citizen can be bound by a law, unless all are subject to it simultaneously
and in the very same way.” Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, Ted Humphrey,
trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), 112. For a contemporary version, see, John Rawls, A Theory of
Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).
20. Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk. II, ch. iv. See also, Julie Mostov, Power, Process, and
Popular Sovereignty (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 27–51
21. The question of who is a full member is no small issue. The extension of full membership to
all subjects of the law is not a given in the history of Western political thought. Note, for example,
John Locke, The Second Treatise on Government, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1980), pars. 119, 122; or Kant, “On the Proverb: That May be True in Theory, But is of no Practical
Use,” 73–76. For democrats, the concern has traditionally been to extend membership as broadly as
possible.
22. Vojin Dimitrijević, Neizvesnost Ljudskih Prava (Sremski Karlovci/Novi Sad: Izdavac̆ka
knjiz̆arnica Zorana Stojanoviać, 1993), 91; Robert M. Hayden, “Nationalism in the Formerly
Yugoslav Republics,” Slavic Review 51:4 (Winter 1992): 663; Mostov, “Democracy and the Politics
of National Identity,” Studies in East European Thought 1–2 (June 1994).
23. Kosovo, in which 90% of the population is ethnic Albanian, is a good example. See, Milan
Podunavac, “Potros̆nja gotovih politic̆kih formula,” Republika 95/96 (July 31, 1994): 15–18.
24. Dennis F. Thompson, The Democratic Citizen: Social Science and Democratic Theory in the
20th Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); also, Stephen Howe, “Citizenship in
the New Europe: A Last Chance for the Enlightenment?” in Geoff Andrews, ed. Citizenship
(London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1991), 130.
25. Exclusions that are written into founding acts, such as constitutions, create obstacles to later
inclusions, that is, to later democratization. Note Derrick Bell on the ways in which the recognition
of slavery in the U.S. Constitution, despite amendments which subsequently nullify this status and
provide for equal citizenship, continue to plague the civic culture in the United States and inhibit
the full enjoyment of citizenship for all. Derrick Bell, And We Are Not Saved (New York: Basic
Books, 1987).
26. In the aftermath of World War II, equal citizenship and solidarity could possibly have been
built in the former Yugoslavia under the collective identity expressed by the above slogan, if it had
not been regularly imposed from above. Indeed, there were no institutions, through which individ-
uals could deliberate as citizens of Yugoslavia and actually engage in the building of bonds. See
Mostov, “Democracy and Decisionmaking,” in Dennison Rusinow, ed., Yugoslavia-A Fractured
Federalism (Washington, DC: Wilson Center, 1988): 105–119.
27. See, Nebojs̆a Popov, Republikanac (Zrenjanin: Gradjanska c̆itaonica-Banat, 1994), 9–59.
28. The kind of citizenship people enjoy, however, ultimately effects their sense of self, will-
ingness to exert the effort required for independent judgment, respect for fellow citizens and the
law, and accordingly, the degree of coercion employed by the state. Under the present conditions,
and in the face of what Adam Michnik calls the “new nihilism,” this citizenship which consists
merely in putting a ballot in a box is not enough to provide resistance to alternative collective iden-
tities. “Fear in the face of new nihilism is slowly occupying Europe. This nihilism attacks democ-
ratic institutions, destroys civic and national communities, and leads to the breakdown of cultural
ties. It wears the face of fundamentalism: ethnic, social, and religious. This fundamentalism leads
down the path to chaos and totalitarian dictatorships of a new type.” Adam Michnik, “Zirinovski,
moja ljubav,” Vreme 31 (January 1994): 43. (My translation from Serbo-Croatian)
29. Judith N. Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1969), 19.
30. Ibid. 175.

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386 Constellations Volume 4, Number 3, 1998
31. The mass meetings engineered by Slobodan Milos̆ević and his followers in 1988 were
crucial in stirring up ethnic passions and support for his regime. See, Predrag Tas̆ić, Kako je
Ubijena Druga Jugoslavija (Skopje, 1994), 120–127.
32. See, Bradley F. Adams, “Morality, Wisdom, and Revision: The Czech Opposition of the
1970’s and the Expulsion of the Sudenten Germans,” East European Politics and Societies 9:2
(Spring 1995), 234–255.

 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998