The Racist Regime of the (White) EU Schengen Border

Regime
IVANA MARJANOVIĆ

European Apartheid and Exception to Neoliberalism

T his text is a critical analysis of the processes that have been unfolding in Europe since 1989 –
processes related to European integration and the creation of the European Union
citizenship, as well as with the implementation of neoliberal capitalism in Eastern Europe, or the
neocolonial appropriation of Eastern Europe as part of the European unification project. Within
this framework, I would like to consider two concepts together. The first is the concept of
European Apartheid proposed by French philosopher Étienne Balibar in the 1990s and beginning
of 2000s and the other is the concept of Exception to Neoliberalism proposed in recent years by the
Chinese anthropologist and theoretician Aihwa Ong (along with the concept of Neoliberalism as
Exception) who is researching and writing about the transformation of citizenship and sovereignty
in South East and East Asia. Along these theoretical lines that I will elaborate further, I will have
as well a case with which to conceptualize my thesis. I will analyze the semi-documentary film
trilogy “Kenedi” by the Serbian film director Želimir Žilnik that presents a critique in its film
format of the neoliberal migration regime under global biopolitical conditions.1
I would propose something that may, at first, seem paradoxical, but is not. Namely, my thesis in
this text is that Exception to Neoliberalism is not just functioning outside of the First capitalist world
as Ong argues, but that it is, on the contrary, functional in the new Europe and in the First
capitalist world today as well. As an outcome of this relation, European Apartheid has been
brought into existence and maintained. We can see it working when witness to atrocious
segregation of migrants in the EU but also in the process of EU unification which enforces the
cleansing of the Western Europe of refugees, asylum seekers and so-called illegal immigrants
through brutal deportations to their countries of origin or countries that are (potential) candidates
for EU membership.
The construction, organization and administration of the borders in Europe (and in other parts
of the world) after 1989 has to do with the creation of world regions or zones of growth and
zones of poverty, zones of life and zones of death, zones of rights and zones of non-rights that
are created through the processes of globalization of capital. Thus, in these zones the binary
division of the world into two (as it was the case in the time of the Cold War) is no longer
functional but instead there exists a very complicated network of zones spread throughout the
world – in its every corner there exists a zone of prosperity and life and a zone of poverty and
death. These zones represent not only simple geographical divisions, but divisions of
subjectivities, knowledge etc. as well. 2 In order to produce and maintain the zones of prosperity,
extremely violent measurements in governing the zones of poverty have to be introduced.
2    |    Worlds & Knowledges Otherwise | Fall 2010  

 
Balibar wrote extensively on the issue of European citizenship and its (im)possibility. He
maintains that European citizenship created as part of the European integration process and as
an exclusive citizenship, not open to all living in Europe, is the main blockage to democracy in
the new Europe. European citizenship is grounded in national citizenships, meaning that all those
having a citizenship of one of the member countries automatically have EU citizenship (entailing
the right to vote in the EU elections, address the Court of Justice of the European Union, etc).
Most of the migrants who are living in European space are overexploited, living in a constantly
precarious situation and vulnerable regarding social and political rights, and are excluded from
that citizenship.
He argues: “European citizenship within the limits of the currently existing union, is not
conceived of as a recognition of the rights and contributions of all the communities present upon
the European soil, but as a postcolonial isolation of “native” and “nonnative” populations. This
exposes the European community to the reactive development of all sorts of identitarian
obsessions, following the model of mutual reinforcement of exclusions and communitarianisms
(including “national”, “secular”, and “republican” communitarianisms) promoted by
globalization”. This situation leads him to see “the current development of true European
apartheid, advancing concurrently with the formal institutions of European citizenship and, in the
long term, constituting an essential element of the blockage of European unification as a
democratic constitution”.3
The other concept that I want to consider here is the concept of Exception to Neoliberalism that
Aihwa Ong proposed (along with the concept of Neoliberalism as Exception). Bringing together two
concepts otherwise discussed separately – the concept of neoliberalism and the concept of
exception – she researches contemporary mutations in citizenship and sovereignty in Asian
countries whose governments have selectively adopted neoliberal forms in creating economic
zones and imposing market criteria on citizenship i.e. in emerging countries where neoliberalism
itself is not the general characteristic of technologies of governing.
On one hand, Ong discusses neoliberalism not as an economic doctrine but as a governmentality
or technology of governing that is a profoundly active way of rationalizing governing and self-
governing in order to “optimize” it. As she puts it: “In contemporary times, neoliberal rationality
informs action by many regimes and furnishes the concepts that inform the government of free
individuals who are then induced to self-manage according to market principles of discipline,
efficiency, and competitiveness”. On the other hand, in contrast to Giorgio Agamben, whose
concept of bare life and bios Ong criticizes because of its binary logic, she conceptualizes the
exception more broadly, as an extraordinary departure in policy that can be deployed to include
as well as to exclude.
In that context Ong argues that “Neoliberalism as exception is introduced in sites of
transformation where market-driven calculations are being introduced in the management of
populations and the administration of special spaces (…) At the same time, exceptions to
neoliberalism are also invoked, in political decisions, to exclude populations and places from
neoliberal calculations and choices” .4
What she finds distinctive about Asian postdevelopmentalism and what is for us significant is “a
checkered geography of governing resulting not from an anemic state apparatus but from a
deliberative neoliberal calculation as to which populations are advantageous or not advantageous
in appealing global markets. The development of such postdevelopmental logic in effect
produces a postdevelopmental geography – the multiplication of differentiated zones of
governing across the national territory – that has specific political effect.”5 Furthermore, she

  2  
 MARJANOVIĆ  |  The Racist Regime of the (White) EU Schengen Border Regime  |    3  

points out: “...the neoliberal stress on economic borderlessness has induced the creation of
multiple political spaces and techniques for differentiated governing within the national terrain.
Especially in emerging, postcolonial contexts, varied techniques of government rely on
controlling and regulating populations in relationship to differentiated spaces of governance, with
a graduated effect on sovereignty, and on citizenship.”6 Thus, she recognizes diverse modes of
government – disciplinary, regulatory or pastoral – that administer populations in terms of their
relevance to global capital. Precisely this is what she calls graduated or variegated sovereignty. 7
How this differentiated administration of populations operates in the case of the EU integration
project, we can see in the post-Yugoslavian space, particularly in the case of Serbia.

The Kenedi Trilogy

I am here using as an example, a film trilogy titled “Kenedi Trilogy” by Želimir Žilnik, a film
director from Novi Sad. The trilogy is named after the main character Kenedi, a Roma person
who is coercively deported from a EU country (in this case Germany) back to Serbia. In 2002
Žilnik was confronted with the absurd situation that in the city of Novi Sad, many of his
neighbors were, all of a sudden, fluently German speaking persons. This was a result of the
“Readmission Agreement” that the Serbian government signed with Germany as part of the
process of EU integration and that allowed Germany numerous instantaneous brutal
deportations of refugees, asylum seekers and so called illegal immigrants originating from Serbia
back to Serbia. Having himself experienced migration in Germany and being sensitive to
marginalized social groups, Žilnik became interested in this paradoxical social and political
situation in which, on the one hand, the EU lays claims to democracy and human rights while, on
the other hand, treats some of the people living on “its” territory as non-humans.

The outcome of Žilnik’s interest was the “Kenedi Trilogy” which consists of the following semi-
documentary/semi-feature films: “Kenedi Goes Back Home” (2003), “Kenedi Lost and Found”
(2005) and “Kenedi is Getting Married” (2007).
In the first part Kenedi is introduced. He is a real character and presents himself with his real
name –Kenedi. He is a young Roma from Kosovo whose family has been living in Germany for
48 years. Unexpectedly, in the middle of the night in the 2000s, German special police brutally
arrested him, beating him up and handcuffing him as if he was a criminal. Shortly after this, he
was deported to Serbia. Having nobody and nothing in Serbia (his family originated from
Kosovo, where during the war they lost all belongings and property) and separated from his
family, Kenedi starts his struggle for survival in the extremely anti-Roma surroundings of Serbia,
where, due to racial discriminations and society divisions, Roma are forced to live in slums,
humiliated, expelled, violently attacked and even killed.8 Thus, Kenedi is compelled to work in
clandestine employment doing the worst and hardest jobs. Having no place to sleep, he lives in
his car. He drives two-three times a week to the airport expecting his family members to be
deported as well. In the airport, he meets other expelled Roma families or individuals whom he
offers a ride as if he was a taxi driver.
These families or individuals, who were war refuges or asylum seekers in Germany, though, as
migrants they lived in constant fear of being thrown out of the country, they nevertheless share
their experiences about the good life in Germany on one side and the brutality of the coercive
deportations from Germany that always happened in the middle of the night without any prior
announcement on the other. They were virtually forced to pack and leave in thirty minutes. At

  3  
4    |    Worlds & Knowledges Otherwise | Fall 2010  

 
the airport, they were robbed by German police (all the money that they possessed was taken
away from them!). Arriving in Belgrade airport most of them are immediately transformed into
homeless, having no money and no place to stay and being offered no state assistance. Hence,
they end up in some of the numerous slums in Serbia.9 Their children are not accepted in Serbian
schools as their parents mostly didn’t manage to bring with them all the necessary documents and
prepare for their new “life” or simply because they don’t understand a word of Serbian as they
were born and grew up in Germany. Having the legal stigma of being expelled from the EU they
have no chance of going back legally to the country where they had lived for decade(s).10 But, in
spite of this desperate and humiliating situation, the film illustrates the conflictual side of
migration, and what happens when subjects refuse to accept the control and confinement
imposed upon them.
The second and third parts of the film trilogy reveal Kenedi’s persistence in his struggle to
migrate back to the EU, a struggle that subverts the politics of identity inherent to neo-liberalism.
“Travel becomes the law, becoming becomes the code (…) Becoming imperceptible is the most
precise and effective tool migrants employ to oppose the individualizing, quantifying, and
representational pressures of the settled, constituted geopolitical power.”11 Thus, Kenedi is
constantly in a state of becoming: becoming a construction worker, becoming a sex worker,
becoming gay… “Migration adapts differently to each particular context, changes its faces, links
unexpected social actors together, absorbs and reshapes the sovereign dynamics targeting its
control. Migration is arbitrary in its flows, de-individualised, and constitutive of new transnational
spaces which exceed and neutralize sovereign politics (…) Migration is the sister of transience,
produces mixed forms, menwomen, new species (…) Dis-identification=being everyone.
Because, you must be everyone in order to be everywhere.”12
 
In an interview with Žilnik, Hito Steyerl remarked that this film “shows the co-production of the
figure of the “Gypsy” by two complementary forces, namely the Western European biopolitical
bureaucracy and the local, in this case Serbian, elites — both depict and give food to our
imagination about the Roma as homeless, illiterate, poor and completely depraved. This film also
depicts a process that documents how common workers and schoolchildren are being
transformed into “Gypsies” by forcefully uprooting them from their environment and making
them homeless. But Žilnik’s film also shows that the Roma protagonists keep their dignity, even
against all odds.”13
What interests us here is how the ideological mechanism that produces the fiction of
race/ethnicity (in our example “Gipsies”) functions in the context of EU integration. In order to
fully understand it I would make a detour into recent developments in the relationship between
the EU and Serbia.

Producing race/ethnicity in the EU

In December 2009, breaking news appeared: The EU is going to award Serbia (along with two
more former Yugoslavian republics – Macedonia and Montenegro) with membership of the
“White Schengen List” two weeks earlier than was planned. This is, said EU officials, a Christmas
present for Serbia!14

  4  
 MARJANOVIĆ  |  The Racist Regime of the (White) EU Schengen Border Regime  |    5  

Serbian membership on the “White Schengen List” is the outcome of a set of reforms and
regulations called the “Road map to Visa liberalization”, set up with the aim of achieving a visa
free regime for Serbian citizens traveling to the Schengen Area.15 This means that Serbian
citizens are now free to travel to Schengen countries without being exposed to the complicated
procedure (that is not affordable for everybody) of issuing visa, as in former days. At the same
time, it represents one step further for Serbia in the EU integration process. The agreement was
supposed to start from 01.01.2010 but abruptly, as was said in the media, EU officials decided to
give a Christmas present to Serbia stating that the agreement is going to start from 19.12.2009 so
that Serbian citizens can visit their families in the Diaspora to spend the Christmas holidays
together (as if those religious Serbs were celebrating Christmas according to the Gregorian
calendar?!). It would be challenging to make an additional analysis of this infantilization of Serbia
(and other countries from the region16) which is given a Christmas present by the EU, as well as
an analysis of the integration regime excluding from the “White Schengen List” all those Western
Balkans countries where Islam is the predominant religion thus establishing new hierarchies in
the region. Such an analysis would reveal the deeply and fundamentally conservative Christian
and nationalist character of the EU that must be seen in relation to colonial appropriation by
Christian western European countries. Unfortunately, there is not enough space in this paper for
that.
In order for some to be granted the right of “freedom” of movement in Europe (they can stay
only a limited amount of days in the EU!) a price had to be paid, meaning that others had to be
transformed into “Gypsies,” homeless, i.e. into bare life.17 It was repeatedly said in the media for
the last few years that the key conditions for the “White Schengen List,” were numerous bilateral
readmission agreements between the EU countries and Serbia and one common readmission
agreement between the EU and Serbia. 18 These agreements imply deporting to Serbia not only
150 00019 refugees, asylum seekers and so called illegal immigrants living in the EU holding a
Yugoslav passport20 but also readmission of all those coming from a third country who entered
EU territory illegally via Serbia. Moreover, for membership of the “White Schengen List” other
processes were imposed by the EU. New racist laws and strategies were implemented such as
(besides many others): “Border Strategy,” “Strategy for the Suppression of Illegal Migration” and
“Migration Management Strategy” in accordance with EU standards and requirements. One of
the outcomes of these new laws, which are mainly just copy-pasted from the EU (like all other
new laws in Serbia after 200021) will be that the so called illegal immigrants who are caught by
police in Serbia on their trajectory to the EU and who then decide to seek asylum must stay in
Serbia and cannot legally migrate to the EU, meaning that Serbia will become not just a transit
zone on their way to the EU but a non-chosen destination. In the last few years new camps
(called “centers”) for illegal immigrants and asylum seekers have been opened and are operating
in Serbia. Consequently, Serbia (and the Western Balkans) is being transformed into the outer
security zone of the EU (the inner is the border of the Schengen Area). Therefore, in order to be
a privileged member of the “White Schengen List,” Serbia (and the non-Islamic part of the
Western Balkans) had to be transformed into a disastrous filtering zone imposing an enormous
security and legally repressive apparatus, a process that other countries of Eastern Europe that
are now members of the EU already passed through (for instance the former Yugoslav republic
Slovenia).
The brutality and violence imposed by the EU and Germany as the member country that we see
in Žilnik’s film, is actually working hand in hand with the brutality and violence imposed by its
potential candidate22 for admission – the country of Serbia, which is ready to do everything that
the EU prescribes, in order to become a member.

  5  
6    |    Worlds & Knowledges Otherwise | Fall 2010  

 
The negotiations for the “Stabilization and Association Agreement” that started between the
Serbian government and the EU as early as in 2005 but were prepared for intensively after 2000
(when the Milošević regime was overthrown) are actually not at all negotiations in the real sense
of the word. From the side of the EU, all rules and conditions are set in advance with treaties
such as The Treaty of Rome, The Maastricht Treaty etc. Serbia and other countries that are in the
process of joining the EU are not in a position to negotiate anything! They are turned into pure
objects of neocolonial EU intervention (political, social, economical and cultural) with economics
and new market exploitation opportunities as the main factor of interest of the EU in the region
and as the main engine of integration. The EU is enforcing a set of requirements, standards and
values that Serbia (and other countries in the region) has to meet, implement and demonstrate.
One day (nobody knows when), when Serbia proves that it is “mature” and when the EU has
earned enough profit from the difference in life standard and salaries in this region, Serbia can
probably become a part of Fortress Europe.23
Referring to Foucault, Tihomir Topuzovksi, an artist and theorist from Macedonia recently
analyzed the condition in which the countries of the Western Balkans are the subjects of the
panoptical perspective of the European Union (Serbia is part of the constructed zone named
“Western Balkans”) whose aim is to turn these countries into a replica of the EU. “The
European Union, through the distribution of knowledge markers that enable the functioning of
expert teams, is permanently supervising the Western Balkans; it is monitoring the processes that
should be a kind of training and preparation for participation in the European Union (from the
execution of reforms to a whole range of regulations which aim at reshaping the region).
Practicing the political values that are valid for the European Union is a process of insemination.
Now, this region is put under the tutorship of the European Union in order to create real
political values in the region for the future. As an illustration, the entire program created for this
region is a therapy prescribed by an instance of experts. Those implants must be necessarily
accepted, since the states of the Western Balkans are in an unequal position in relation to the EU;
this relation is not reciprocal. It is a relation with no exchange; a relation of difference and
imbalance that includes the imperative form of speech. Furthermore, Topuzovksi describes the
punishment mechanism of the EU Panopticon: “The Panopticon model has been used
particularly by Foucault, who defines it as homeostatic: i.e. if you don’t act in compliance with the
apparatus that is imposed on you, then you provoke pain on yourself.”24
Apparently, Serbia, while causing no pain to itself, was advancing in its preparation for
participation in the European Union and was awarded with the membership on the “White
Schengen List” for its progress. But, sometime ago one local politician and university professor
stated that, actually, the above mentioned readmission agreement is not a condition for the
“White Schengen List”! He said that these two issues were negotiated in parallel, but that the
EU expected a cooperative attitude from Serbia so that when the EU deports the so called illegal
immigrants, Serbia shows a willingness to momentarily accept them, making no demands or
conditions that could be understood as shifting the costs of supporting these people onto the
EU.25 Therefore, we see that the EU’s directives are not always in the imperative form of speech
but they are actually suggestions that are given to Serbia by the EU. Apparently, Serbia takes
these prescriptions deadly seriously, wanting to prove that it is a good pupil, doing extra
homework.

  6  
 MARJANOVIĆ  |  The Racist Regime of the (White) EU Schengen Border Regime  |    7  

Neoliberal calculus

What is here at play is the technology of the self, the agency or the self-governance that is argued
by scholars to be one of the key instruments in neoliberal govenmentality. As Aihwa Ong
pointed out, neoliberal governmentality means, besides other things, self-governing in order to
“optimize” in regard to neoliberal calculations. This means that we, as allegedly free subjects, are
governed in such a way that we comply with the expectations of those that are governing us: we
are expected to act in an optimal way in relation to neoliberal capitalism. In our example of
neoliberal self-governance we don’t have a good citizen but a whole region, a zone that is as good
“subject” governing itself in an optimal way regarding neoliberal calculations and allocation of
capital in this region.
But while the whole zone of the Western Balkan is transformed into a self-governing neoliberal
“subjectivity”, what we see in Žilnik’s film – Roma being expelled from the EU, deported to
Serbia and transformed into bare life – leads us to conclude that we can find in these processes a
specificity of the European Union governance mechanism generated within European
integration. This particularity informs us of the character of that integration and its logic.
Ong discusses the concepts of Neoliberalism as Exception and Exceptions to Neoliberalism in the frame
of postcolonialism, authoritarianism, and postsocialism.26 But, what we can argue on the basis of
the above argumentation related to the mentioned film (and many other scientific, artistic and
activist works dealing with the same issue27), is that exceptions to neoliberalism are also functional in
neoliberalism’s core space that is the space of the First world or Western Europe (and of course, the
USA). Exceptions to neoliberalism are employed in managing and governing migrant populations
in the European Union today depending on their relevance to global capital. Some of these
populations are “not likely to be productively used or exploited”28 meaning that some of these
populations “are not advantageous in appealing global markets.”29 As Marina Gržinić pointed
out,30 “today, the neoliberal capitalist ideology (…) ‘cleans the terrain’ against those who are
perceived by the same ideology as a non-productive part of the First world matrix.” Thus, all
those expelled people we talk about here, are excluded from neoliberal calculations and choices in
a certain space. Therefore, a different mode of governing is employed to administer these
populations. They are governed through violence in contrast to other populations that are allowed to
be self-governed. Hence, it is precisely the exceptions to neoliberalism that are the condition
which allow something like European Apartheid, created along with European citizenship after
1989, to be brought into existence and maintained in present day Europe. Or in other words, it is
precisely the exceptions to neoliberalism that have as the outcome the fact that “The EU is
transformed into one giant concentration camp” as Marina Gržinić stated in an analysis of
another film by Žilnik.31
Thus, we can conclude that it is the exceptions to neoliberalism that is the key logic in power in
the European integration process. In our paradigmatic example, we don’t have the form of
governance that is normally in force in EU – where subjects are expected to be responsible,
entrepreneurial, decision-making, risks-taking, owners of their own bodies etc. On the contrary,
we have subjects that are not considered to be (useful) subjects or subjects of no use, subjects
against whom exceptional measures such as violence and coercion are employed in order to
govern, subjects that the EU wants to get rid of as soon as possible, subjects that are brutally
expelled. Therefore, through interactions of exceptions of neoliberalism, European Apartheid
produces what Ong terms as zones of differentiated governance – zones of neoliberal self-
governance and zones of governance through violence. These zones are intertwined throughout

  7  
8    |    Worlds & Knowledges Otherwise | Fall 2010  

 
the new Europe and the globe. That is exactly the background upon which Agamben can state
that the camp is a biopolitical paradigm of modernity.32

***

Ivana Marjanović, BA in Art History. Born in 1979, Belgrade, Serbia. PhD candidate at Academy
of Fine Arts, Vienna. Free-lance cultural worker in the field of contemporary arts and theory.
Co-founded Kontekst Gallery in Belgrade (www.kontekstgalerija.org). Published articles in
books, exhibition catalogues, international magazines and online artistic and theoretical platforms
such as Reartikulacija, Mute, eipcp.net, Kulturisse, Malmoe, etc. Lives and works in Vienna.

Notes

                                                                                                               
1 Cf. Rutvica Andrijasević, Manuela Bojadžijev, “Notes on migration management and citizenship in the
area of ex-Yugoslavia,” 2004,
http://www.transitmigration.org/db_transit_e/ausgabe_e.php?inhaltID=116, retrieved on March 31,
2010.
2Cf. Étienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Translation/Transnation),
Princeton University Press, 2004; Marina Gržinić, “Analysis of the exhibition ‘Gender Check – Femininity
and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe’ Museum of Modern Art, (MUMOK), Vienna, November
2009/February 2010,” 2009, http://eipcp.net/policies/grzinic/en, retrieved on March 31, 2010; Aihwa
Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception, Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty, Duke University Press, 2006.
3Cf. Étienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Translation/Transnation),
Princeton University Press, 2004, p. 170.
4Cf. Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception, Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty, Duke University Press,
2006, pp. 3–5.
5 Ibid, pp. 77 – 78.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 About anti-Romaism in Serbia and Europe see my text: “Contention of Antiromaism as a Part of the
Process of Decoloniality of Europe,” in Reartikulacija, no. 7, Ljubljana 2009,
http://www.reartikulacija.org/?p=647, retrieved on March 31, 2010.
9More about Belgrade slums see above footnote and Lorenc Agerman, Eduard Frojdman, Djan Gildji,
Beograd Gazela – Vodič kroz sirotinjsko naselje [Belgrade Gazela: Travel Guide to a Slum], RENDE, Belgrade,
2009; Lorenz Aggermann, Eduard Freudmann, Can Gülcü, Beograd Gazela – Reiseführer in eine
Elendssiedlung, Drava Verlag, Klagenfurt, 2008.

  8  
 MARJANOVIĆ  |  The Racist Regime of the (White) EU Schengen Border Regime  |    9  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
10Similar reports appear in scientific research: Rutvica Andrijasević, Manuela Bojadžijev, “Notes on
migration management and citizenship in the area of ex-Yugoslavia,” Ibid; About conditions upon arrival
see: Ivan Zlatić, “Ponovo zajedno!”[Together again!], Z Magazin Balkan, no. 3, Belgrade, 2007;
11Dimitris Papadopoulos, Vassilis Tsianos, “The Autonomy of Migration: The Animals of Undocumented
Mobility,” in: Anna Hickey-Moody, Peta Malins, eds., Deleuzian Encounters. Studies in Contemporary Social
Issues, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2007;
http://translate.eipcp.net/strands/02/papadopoulostsianos-strands01en, retrieved on March 31, 2010.
12 Ibid.
13Cf. “An Interview with Žilnik by Marina Gržinić, Ljubljana/Vienna and Hito Steyerl, Berlin,” in ART-e-
FACT, strategies of resistance, no. 3, 2004, http://artefact.mi2.hr/_a03/lang_en/art_zilnik_en.htm, retrieved
on March 31, 2010.
14 Cf. http://www.vesti-online.com/Vesti/Srbija/5285/Ren-Ukidanje-viza--poklon-za-Bozic;
http://www.b92.net/info/vesti/index.php?yyyy=2009&mm=11&dd=30&nav_category=11&nav_id=39
540, retrieved on March 31, 2010.
15 Schengen is a name for an agreement that provides for the removal of border controls between the EU
countries while constructing a Fortress Europe. On the construction of new forms of insecurity in EU in
relation to its outer borders see: William Walters & Jens Henrik Haahr, Governing Europe: Discourse,
Governmentality and European Integration, London: Routledge, 2005., pp 91– 114.
16 In media Bosnia and Albania were addressed as the countries that didn’t make their homework and
thus could not enter the “White Schengen List”. http://derstandard.at/1259280843192/Serben-
Montenegriner-und-Mazedonier-duerfen-visafrei-in-EU-einreisen, retrieved on March 31, 2010.
17Cf. Giorgio Agamben, HOMO SACER, Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press,
Stanford, 1998.
18 Some of these agreements were signed as early as in 1996 in the time of Milošević rule, but were
effectively activated after the war in Kosovo and after the change of the regime in Serbia in 2000. The one
with EU was signed in 2008.
19Source: http://www.opstina-negotin.org.yu/article.php?lg=sr&id_article=980, retrieved on December
18, 2009.
20 Though Yugoslavia doesn’t exist anymore, most of Serbs still hold the passports with the old name of
the state. At the moment the procedure of changing them for the new biometric (!) passports where
“Republic Serbia” is written, is going on. The whole procedure was the demand of the EU and its security
apparatus – therefore biometric passports.
21 Mlađan Dinkić, Minister of Economy and Regional Development and as a Deputy Prime Minister
stated that “Serbia has never been writing its own laws, after 2000 we have been mostly coping European
Union laws.” http://www.b92.net/info/emisije/insajder.php?yyyy=2007&mm=04&nav_id=240657,
retrieved on March 31, 2010.
22Serbia doesn’t have yet the official status of the EU candidate country. One of the main reasons is that
Serbia didn’t deliver major war criminals to the United Nations International Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia in The Hague. BUT Serbia behaves as if it is a candidate meaning that all structural changes in
economy, society and politics expected from the side of the EU are being made.
23 An excellent analysis of much more extreme relation of this kind (between Kosovo and the
international administration) was given by Vjollca Krasniqi at the symposium “Reading Gender. Art,

  9  
10    |    Worlds & Knowledges Otherwise | Fall 2010  

 
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
Power and Politics of Representation in Eastern Europe”, in MUMOK, Vienna, 13 November 2009. The
title of the lecture was: “Returning the Gaze: Gender and Power in Kosovo.”
24Cf. Tihomir Topuzovski, “From the imagining of the Balkans to the Invention of the Western
Balkans,” Reartikulacija, no. 6, Ljubljana, 2009.
25  Cf. “Kašnjenje Srbije” [Delay of Serbia], Talk between Ivo Visković (head of the Department of
International Relations at the Faculty of Political Sciences) in Belgrade and Klara Kranjc (journalist),
Kažiprst Radio Show, Radio B92, 16th October 2006.
http://www.b92.net/info/emisije/kaziprst.php?yyyy=2006&mm=10&nav_id=215712, retrieved on
March 31, 2010.  
26Cf. Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception, Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty, Duke University Press,
2006, p. 14.
27 For example Tanja Ostojić’s video Naked Life (2004–08).
28Cf. Étienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Translation/Transnation)
Princeton University Press, 2004, p. 28.
29Cf. Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception, Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty, Duke University Press,
2006, p. 77.
30 Cf. Marina Gržinić, “Ex-Yugoslav Avant-garde Film Production and its Early Works seen through
Biopolitics and Necropolitics,” in For an Idea – Against the Status Quo, Analysis and Systematization of Želimir
Žilnik’s Artistic Practice, Playground produkcija, Novi Sad, 2009.
31 Ibid.

32Cf. Giorgio Agamben, HOMO SACER, Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press,
Stanford, 1998.

  10