Identity and Security in Former Yugoslavia

Zlatko Isakovic

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351733496
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Politique et relations internationales
• Thema: Politique

This title was first published in 2000. A clear, concise and comprehensive analysis of the concept of societal security, this groundbreaking book systematically applies the concept of societal security to the five successor states of Former Yugoslavia. Looking at the past and present, it studies the implications for the future.

1
Introduction

The term societal security was first used in Buzan’s book People, States and Fear. In the same book, the author defined security generally as the “pursuit of freedom from threat” (1991: 20), later saying that “evaluating what is, and what is not, a threat, to whom, in what way and over what time-scale can be a tricky business” (1993b: 43). He located societal security initially as just one among five sectors of state security (along with military, political, economic, and environmental security), i.e. society was just one sector where the state can be threatened (see 1991).

A couple of years later Wæver went a step further in the anthology Identity, Migration and the New Security Agenda in Europe, arguing that the five-dimensional approach was not tenable any more as a framework for societal security (1993: 25) and proposing the concept consisting of a duality of state and societal security. This approach was utilized and more details were given in later works on the concept of societal security (see Wæver, 1994; Wæver, 1995; Buzan and Wæver 1997).

They noted that the previous approach to broadening the security concept had consisted in adding dimensions to the military one while keeping the state as the subject of security; this makes sense for some dimensions, but not for societal security, where the nation, rather than the state, is to be seen as the subject and dynamics to be studied in the duality of state (“national”) and societal security. This volume moves on from general theoretical deliberations to specific analyses of societal security in the Yugoslav successor states.

Societal security itself is defined as “the ability of a society to persist in its essential character under changing conditions and possible or actual threats”, when it comes to perceive its identity as threatened, and when, on this basis, it begins to act in a security mode triggering certain kinds of behaviour (Wæver, 1993: 23). The main purpose of this volume is to apply the concept of societal security systematically to one area: the five states into which the Second Yugoslavia have now been divided (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Third Yugoslavia and Macedonia), looking at the past and present and trying to draw implications for the future.

Threats to a society’s identity may range from the conquering of historic territory and the deportation or killing of members of the community, to the suppression of society’s expression of its own identity and interference with its ability to reproduce itself, including forbidding the use of language (denying language rights), names and dress, through closure of places of education and worship (denying freedom of worship). It was noticed that if the institutions that reproduce language and culture are forbidden to operate, then identity can not be transmitted effectively from one generation to the next. However, the same kind of threats “may not only come from forbidding something, but also allowing it.”

Forbidding something will often be in terms of a threat to the minority group from the majority group. Allowing something, however, may be the other way around: allowing a minority group something may threaten the homogeneity of the state…” (Buzan, 1993b: 43).

According to nature of used means, threats to societal security may be military ones (killing members of the group, conquering historic territory) as well as non-military ones (denying language rights, freedom of worship) (Roe, 1997a: 9). It was also noticed that “the nation state may be accused of injustice both if it promotes equality and if it promotes difference”. In the case when the state emphasizes equal rights and duties, members of a minority may complain about disrespect for their cultural distinctiveness. On the other hand, if the state emphasizes cultural differences, members of a minority may complain that they were actively discriminated against. After the eventual separation of minorities, new minority problems may be created, this time at another level (Eriksen, 1992: 222).

It was suggested that the implications of the societal security concept for policy are “far from clear”, arguing that the authors did not attempt “to develop any complete or coherent prescription. They acknowledge the familiar dilemma: is there not a risk that raising the agenda of societal security might seem to legitimise xenophobia and nationalist reactions against foreigners or against European integration?” They argue that this danger, however, “has to be set against the necessity to use the concept of societal security to try to understand what is actually happening” (Blunden, 1996: 24; cf. Buzan, 1993a: 188–9). As Buzan noticed, “societal security is less self-defining than state security, but not necessarily less real” (1993a: 187).

Elaborating his concept, Wæver said that the difference between the pure state definition and the one of state security via societal security is of vital importance if nation² and state do not coincide. In that case, “the security of a nation will often increase the insecurity of the state - or more precisely if the state has a homogenising ‘national’ programme…, its security will by definition be in conflict with the societal security of ‘national’ projects of subcommunities inside the state”. In some cases, the more that members of the subcommunity develop and practise their own ‘national’ project, the less success there will be for the state homogenising ‘national’ programme, and in some others, the state is more secure when the members of a minority nation feel secure in regard to their national identity and survival, i.e. societal security in a federal state. The differences between the state and societal sector of security could be expressed by other words stating that while the existence of the state primarily depends on the maintenance of its sovereignty, the existence of the ethnic group, it has been argued, depends very much on the preservation of its identity. Thus whereas state security is concerned with threats to its sovereignty (if the state loses its sovereignty it will not survive as a state), societal security is concerned with threats to a society’s identity (if a society loses its identity it will not survive as a society) (1993: 25).

Societies are fundamentally about identity. They are about what enables a group of people to refer to themselves as ‘we’. … The defining modes of ‘we’, ‘us’ and ‘them’ are all challenged by the formation of new identities, and the movement of people carrying different identities (Buzan, 1993c: 5–6).

In Wæver’s opinion, societal identity (that what enables the word ‘we’ to be used), the main unit of analysis for societal security, has two main sources: politically significant ethno-national and religious identities. Both identities “have acquired particular prominence compared to other social groups because of their historical association with the development of the modern state”. The association is partly complementary (for example, when societal identities provide governments with legitimacy) and partly contradictory (for instance, when societal divisions provide assaults against governmental authority and legitimacy with their basis) (1993: 23).

According to some opinions, the national identity is one identity in itself, and others hold that it constitutes various other identities, including first of all political and cultural identity. The political national identity is based on emphasizing a civic ideology, a compact well-defined territory as well as the expression of the nation in a single political will or subjectivity of the state. This conception of the nation (often called civic) is regularly connected to the French Revolution, and some elements of French political thinking (see Buzan, 1993b: 47; Wæver, 1993: 29, 32–3; Holm, 1996). In French tradition citizens of state make up its people (the civic definition of nation), and in the thinking of French Enlightenment the state or, more specifically, the citizens’ state defines the nation (patrie). The civic nation is created by means of bureaucratic incorporation, or by nationalism from the top. Utilizing state military, administrative, fiscal and judicial apparatus, “the aristocratic ethnic state was able to define a new and broader cultural identity for the population, even though in practice this often entailed some degree of accommodation between the dominant and peripheral ethnic cultures within the parameters set by the power of the dominant core” (Smith, 1991: 55).

Two authors consider that political identity is a “sense of political community” and sharing a political project, while ethnic identity is “a cultural organic sentiment of being a larger family and ultimately deriving one’s own identity and meaning of life from the community” (Wæver and Kelstrup, 1993: 61).

In German tradition the people are a cultural community; German Romanticism took the view that the nation (Volk) has a primordial existence by virtue of being a cultural community (but it is not clear what constitutes it) and it calling for a state if it does not already have one. An ethnic-genealogical concept of cultural national identity emphasizes descent, popular mobilization, vernacular language and traditions (Smith, 1991: 12). “According to this tradition belonging to the nation is an objective matter: you are bom into the nation and remain a member no matter what you do. The German romantic concept of the nation as formulated by Herder is often mentioned as representing this ethnic-genealogic concept of the nation.” For him the state was not just unnecessary but ‘“a cold monster’, which could not do the nation any good”. In this concept, “there is in other words not necessarily the same close connection between state and nation as in the civic, territorial conception of the nation. In practice elements from both conceptions of the nation have entered the concrete concept of the nation, also in France and Germany” (Hansen, 1993: 2). A nation of this type is created by means of common mobilization of a community by an intellectual group, on that way forming a nation around “the new vernacular historical culture that it has rediscovered” (Smith, 1991: 64).

The societal security concept could be used to define answers for question “how does a society speak?” and also for the essential question “what does the society speak?” (Buzan, 1993a: 187). As societies are often made insecure because of insecurity of important groups within them, the studies of the Copenhagen security school was therefore often focused on the insecurity of specific groups. However, “this has to be kept conceptually separate from the security of a society, societal security”, which “is relevant in itself and not only as an element of state security, because communities (that do not have a state) are also significant political realities, and their reactions to threats against their identity will be politically significant”. This was the reason for modifying the idea of the five sectors security agenda focused on the state, which is its primary referent object. “At the collective unit level (between individual and global) in fact there are two organising centres for the concept of security: state security and societal security. Both of these centres are subjected to influences of ‘individual’ and ‘international’ levels.” It was concluded that “society is not just a sector of state security, but a distinctive referent object alongside it” (Wæver, 1993: 26–7).

It was concluded that “whereas Realists have focused their attention on the level of the state as the only proper referent object of ‘security’, ‘Idealists’ (including a large part of the peace research ‘movement’) have maintained that people, i.e. individuals are what really matters in final analysis”. It may be worth striving for state security to the extent that it contributes to the security understood as the well-being and survival of people. “The state is, at most, a means but never an end itself.” Thus focusing on the lowest level, attention is inevitably also drawn to the highest level (Mankind as a whole). It was concluded that “individual and global security are thus two sides of the same coin” (Møller, 1993: 12–13). Societal security is different from state security. Societal security deals with nation in the sense that nation is not synonymous with state. When one deals with traditional security studies, the agenda is already well defined (sources, strategies, possible future developments and what one can do about that). When one get into societal security field - there is a less defined agenda.

1.1 Main questions and dilemmas

It was noted that ethnonational movements in the Second Yugoslavia, unlike the most post-communist countries in Europe,³ have acquired a social basis for radical centrifugal (separatist) orientations. The pre-war ethnonational mobilization all over the Second Yugoslavia and particularly wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina have left little room for class mobilization in most of the...