P061. Illiberality in the Post-Yugoslav Context: Ideological Transformations and the (Non-)Autonomy of Social Subsystems

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Abstract

Since the disintegration of Yugoslavia, several internal and external political processes (redefinitions of socio-political spheres) have taken place in the post-Yugoslav context, aimed at erasing alternative political projects and forgetting them historically. These processes took place in a transformation of internal and external logics: 1) the transition from self-governing socialism to peripheral capitalism with privatisation and (neo)liberalisation of social subsystems (neo-colonialism, Western hegemony), 2) the abandonment of the Non-Aligned Movement agenda and the adoption of a pro-European geopolitical orientation, together with the intensification of national(istic) identifications. The visibility and rise of illiberal political actors in the geographical spaces of the former Yugoslavia raises the following political-epistemological questions: does the (neo)liberal/EU project contain in its political basis imperatives for the emergence of illiberal politics? And do contexts with socialist experience now recognise what (neo)liberalism is and is not compared to socialism, especially in relation to distributive/social justice and political (in)equality?

Using a critical/marxist criminological approach as an “epistemological decolonial perspective”, I will elaborate the (macro) state-corporate model (R. Michalowski) as the fundamental basis for the concentration of capital-political power of illiberal actors (elites), the absence of collective/political responsibility and the emphasis on neoliberal self-responsibility (social singularity as a “new anomie”). With conceptual apparatus of C. Castoriadis, I will focus on the mezzo-level of social subsystems, in particular on how social neoliberalization, capitalization as anti-politics in the post-Yugoslav context drives the impossibility of their autonomy. The autonomy of subsystems means the possibility of self-institutionalisation within the system and especially the decentralisation/distribution of social power with the potential for political organising, action, critique and imagination of the collective as a form of direct democracy, which Castoriadis identifies in self-governing socialism. I recognise this theoretical imaginary as crucial for analysing the rise of illiberality in contexts that once attempted to build a political alternative.

Author

• Nina Žnidaršič, Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law Ljubljana