A Different Notion of Democracy?

On 20 April 2009 students of the Filozofski fakultet in Zagreb literally Faculty of Philosophy, but commonly translated as Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences occupied the faculty building.1 The occupation was abandoned only 5 weeks later. Even then, however, the student movement emphasized that this withdrawal was no gesture of compromise or capitulation, but the consequence of purely tactical and operational considerations. The demand for the legislative termination of all tuition fees that motivated the occupation remains uncompromised to this day. Since the Ministry of Education and the government as a whole have failed to respond to this demand with adequate legislative and fiscal initiatives, on 23 September 2009 (i.e. five days ago) the occupation was taken up again. No end of struggle is yet in sight.2

During the spring occupations 20 faculties in Zagreb and other university centres in Croatia joined the Filozofski fakultet, making it the most massive student mobilization in the post-socialist period, both in Croatia itself and the broader region. The wave of protests reached beyond Croatia when the University of Tuzla in Bosnia and Herzegovina joined the protests. Occupation attempts at the University of Belgrade in Serbia failed due to difficulties in organisation and decisive repression from the university administration. Eventually, most of the faculties where occupation attempts did succeed were forced to
1 2

Paper delivered at the Historical Materialism Annual Conference 2009, 28 November 2009 The second, autumn occupation of the Filozofski fakultet was abandoned on 5 December 2009. Again, the reasons were of a tactical nature. The government has announced a new Law on Higher Education to reach parliament before the spring of 2010. Despite elements of rhetorical concession to student demands, it is expected to continue the deepening of commercialisation and neoliberal restructuring of Croatia's universities and is bound to trigger further opposition. [Footnote added after the end of the autumn occupation.]

abandon occupation before the Filozofski fakultet in Zagreb. The ongoing autumn occupations are being joined by other faculties throughout Croatia, but have, as of yet, failed to reach the extent of the wave of the spring occupations.

In many of its aspects the occupations of the Filozofski differ from similar actions at other universities in Europe. For one, while all regular teaching is cancelled, the doors of the faculty remain open for the general public, non-students included. Alternative lectures and screenings are being organized, mostly dealing with social and political issues from openly critical and heterodox standpoints usually disregarded within standard curricula. Thus, instead of being simply shut down, the faculty is being reappropriated as a public space and reaffiremd as a public utility in the strong sense of the term. Directly challenging the dominant ideology of academic space as a space beyond politics, the occupations proceeded by declaring the autistic disregard for the political and social realities beyond the borders of academia to be an implicit political choice in itself. From this followed that the challenge too had to be framed in openly political terms. In consequence, the occupation declares itself synonymous with the self-conscious creation of a rare and important opportunity: to combine a negative critique of prevalent academic ideology with a positive agenda of political and educational counter-practice, to be immediately realised within the spatial and social parameters liberated by the act of occupation itself.

The demand for the termination of all forms of tuition fees is raised in explicit reference to the right to equal opportunity to education inscribed in Croatia's constitution. This

should be understood not as a concession to liberal legalist orthodoxy, but as a strategic choice that allowed the student movement to stage a confrontation with the broadly neoliberal consensus hegemonic not only within the current conservative government but among all parties currently holding seats in parliament in terms they would have to accept as binding. The government's (inevitable?) refusal to comply with this particular provision of the constitution then provided the tactical opportunity to publicly emphasise the democratic deficiencies built into governmental decision making practices beyond the narrow question of technically properly conducted elections to which such questions are often conveniently reduced in the mainstream. This, in turn, opened further space for challenging neoliberal policies beyond the immediate concern of the submission of the university to market-oriented reforms and the commodification of knowledge. Against all attempts to reduce the question of tuition-free education to one of technocratic calculation within 'objective' fiscal limitations, the student movement insisted on its fundamentally political character. It was emphatically asserted that the students' demands can not be severed or isolated from claims of other social actors, stylized as so many competing 'interest groups', but must be understood as one among many constitutive aspects of a broader struggle against a consistent neoliberal onslaught conducted both by local elites and centres of power located outside the borders of the country, first among them being the European Union. The governments repeated insistence on supposedly 'objective' fiscal limitations that prevent it from complying with demands directly derived from rights asserted by the constitution was taken up by the student movement and made a case in point in the critique of the progressive hollowing out of the very notion of democracy under conditions of really existing capitalist restoration. The introduction of

the Plenum or General Assembly as the central organ of decision-making during the occupation functioned as the immediate correlative on the level of positive counterpractice to this negative critique of democracy's submission to political agendas in open collision with the interests and nominally asserted rights of the majority of the people. Surprisingly enough, the word plenum was soon promoted to the status of political buzzword of the year in Croatia.

Yet precisely this circumstance as well as the fact that university occupations even if lasting for five weeks and conducted militantly could have the public impact they have had in Croatia must remain puzzling for most outside observers. How could something so common in countries like France be declared by so many commentators in the country to be the most significant political event of the past twenty years of its history? Especially if we take into the equation the war that accompanied Croatia's secession from Yugoslavia and everything that it inaugurated demographically, socially and economically? My argument is that his seemingly excessive and disproportionate response should be read as a displaced symptom of the political and ideological configuration into which the occupations intervened. For one, the form and content of the initial acclamations and applause with which the occupations were received by many left-liberal commentators, third-way social democrats and many NGOs proved to be nothing more than the inverted mirror image of a thoroughgoing political defeatism enveloping them all. Celebrating the figure of the student in revolt meant all too often the substitution of properly political reactions with generational narratives and the evasion of political responsibility through its delegation to a new generation of youth, to which the mandate to be pure in our stead

could then be assigned without political risk or consequences. Acclamation could be and predominantly was made to serve the purpose of safely disregarding the political agenda on which the occupations were based. In extreme cases it merely provided the initial alibi for consequent dismissal of the political dimension of the demands as insubstantial rhetorical hyperbolism obligating no one, least of all the government.

But however great a part such conscious or unconscious calculations may have played in the minds of those who took care not to be caught on the wrong side of history once the occupations had been proclaimed to possess more than passing relevance, they fail to explain the political rupture the student movement has come to signify for many. Even reference to the fact that no relevant, programmatically consistent challenge to the course of neoliberal 'structural adjustments' had been publicly visible before the onset of the occupations leaves more questions pending than it answers. As does the fact that even the term 'neoliberalism' hardly figured in the media and public debates before it was introduced by the occupations, despite aggressive diffusion of market ideology through and into all pores of society.

It is the incredibly persistent effectiveness of the ideological narrative of ascendency towards membership in the European Union that has so far prevented any critical discussion of the social reality capitalist restoration has produced in Croatia. All social violence constitutive of the process is always already legitimized by the phantasma of future affluence, as long as it can be presented as a necessary step towards the threshold of EU membership. As long as political decisions, however harmful to the majority, can

be referred back to norms or dictates originating in Brussels or other Western centres of power, they are not only automatically exempt from critical interrogation, but lose the status of political decisions proper. Stripped of their political character and presented as mere administrative necessities, governmental decisions are placed beyond the reach of democratic interference or questioning. One striking example among many is the way the ratification of the WTO General Agreement on Trade in Services to return to an example with immediate implications for higher education was conducted by the Croatian parliament in 2000. Not only was there no public discussion of its potential political, social and economic implications, but the agreement was hastily ratified without having been translated into Croatian first, which presents a violation of Croatian law. Yet this has triggered no critical response. To my knowledge not even from so-called 'eurosceptic' fractions of the now politically relatively marginal populist right.

But public deficit of critical responses runs even deeper than that. Criticism of blatantly criminal aspects of the privatisation process, which could not be absolved with reference to the demands of 'Western integration', to a large part conducted with the war as a convenient but temporary cover, has not led towards a systemic questioning of capitalist restoration, but, ironically, often served to occlude the very possibility of systemic critique. The denunciation of crimes connected to the privatisation process tended for the most part to be staged in terms of self-defeating moralist self-denunciations: It is allegedly not capitalism as such that is at fault, but our specific, Balkan-style deviation from it. Willingly or not, exclusive focus on the scandal of primitive accumulation thus contributed to the normalisation of the 'silent coercions' of capitalist accumulation proper,

including all of the allegedly 'creative' social destruction necessary to maintain and facilitate its 'smooth' perpetuation. The immediate political consequence of this obfuscation was the cultivation of a widespread willingness to surrender to neo-colonial arrangements with the West, in the delusion of thereby escaping the pathologies assumed to be constitutive of the Balkans as a region (or the post-socialist East in general) in favour of the phantasised normality and affluence of the Western 'welfare state'. If the immediacy of the horrors of war and the obscenities of primitive accumulation served to secure seeming empirical plausibility to the first part of the equation the pathologisation of the region, the empirical plausibility of its second part the assumed historical persistence of the Western welfare state, remained entirely uninterrogated. The racist and fatalist myth of the historic and 'civilisational' anomalousness of the Balkans thus served to uphold the political effectiveness of the myth of Europe. Taken together and mutually enforcing each other, they block the perspective for any attempt at critical interrogation of the social destructiveness constitutive of capitalist restoration, let alone its challenging.

The extent to which the 'left' in Croatia has confined itself within the parameters of these complementary ideological narratives is the precise measure of its impotence, if not cause enough to assert its virtual non-existence. The most damaging consequence of the absence of systemic left critique is the confinement of discussions of the very notion of democracy within the rigid boundaries of a false choice between condemning ourselves to stay stuck in the bad infinity of alleged Balkan backwardness, corruption and authoritarianism (with the possibility of yet another round of ethnic bloodshed never too far away), and the wholesale surrender to the dictates of centres of power such as the EU

(and, in a previous period, the IMF). The lasting result of this conceptual confinement has been that 'democratisation' has come to signify automatic obedience to the political and economic demands of the European Commission and other agents of Western interests and power. The implicit abolition of any pretence to democratic sovereignty is being justified by the claim that the EU represents 'already functioning democracies' and that compliance with its demands merely serves to strengthen Croatia's transformation into a properly democratic state. The decisions of an exclusive club of EU (or IMF) bureaucrats are thereby ideologically raised to the status of demands uttered by democracy itself, thus allowing for any opposition or critical questioning of such demands to be portrayed and easily dismissed as inherently 'antidemocratic', regardless of whether emerging from a mostly virtual left or a currently still declining populist right. In hegemonic (neo)liberal discourse, both are subsumed under the indiscriminative accusation of 'dangers to democracy' and denounced as irrational, regressive tendencies pulling the country back into one of two equally self-defeating and undesirable historical dead ends: nationalist isolationism or socialism, now made ideologically interchangeable and virtually indistinguishable. The defining paradox of Croatia's two decades of 'transition' can thus be stated in the following terms: the progressive narrowing of the scope of questions open to interference from below is presented as an advance towards democracy, not its retreat. The assault on democratic structures and norms is being conducted in democracy's very name.

This is the precisely process the student movement has come to challenge. The Plenum as a forum of deliberation is emphatically inclusive. Once the question of tuition-free

education had been defined as both a right and common good, i.e. precisely not as the exclusive concern of the students as an 'interest group' distinct from other competing social actors, it necessarily followed that everyone had the right to participate in its work and decisions. If we had to sum up the fundamental political challenge this presented to the status quo in a single formula, it would be: direct democracy assuming the role of a challenge to the broken promises of representative democracy under capitalism. It is both a vivid symptom of the failures of liberal parliamentary democracy and a form of polemically 'taking it by its word', by superseding it.