Have you noticed how politicians in the Western Balkans tend to frame every single major governing challenge in terms of progress on the road to joining the EU? It’s as though membership in the EU is not just a strategic goal that all of these countries have set, but more like the ultimate purpose of everything our Governments do.
Let me give you an example from my own country. In Montenegro, everyone is talking about the need to combat powerful drug cartels, and the need to prosecute cases of high-level corruption, especially in the judiciary and the police. And yet even this kind of stuff – stuff that’s supposed to be a self-evident matter of national interest – gets talked about by our political elites almost exclusively in terms of getting to close Chapters 23 and 24 in our accession negotiations with the EU. Which makes it seem as though reducing crime and corruption is really all about us being able to join some kind of club, rather than, you know – about having less crime and corruption around. And you’ll encounter this way of framing the most pressing issues of the day as you listen to politicians all throughout the Western Balkans.
So, why is this an actual problem, beyond semantics? Well, one of the main insights of discourse theory is that the way we speak about things, the way we frame the concepts and relations that make up our view of what we call ‘social reality’ actually ends up constituting that reality. And this, of course, applies to the domain of politics and power structures. Now, power is not a property or a thing that someone wields, in the way that a “Harry Potter” character would wield a magic wand – power is, in fact, more like a relation that obtains between subjects. And that power relation can never be reduced to being simply an expression of some deeper, more fundamental relation, like that of economic dependency or military superiority – instead, in large part, power relations get constructed and reproduced in discourse. So, when we try to give an account of a certain power dynamics, we’re never merely describing what is already objectively there, but we instead participate in constructing that power dynamics by our very act of speaking about it.
So how does any of that relate to our political situation in the Western Balkans? You might’ve heard it said that the status of the Western Balkan states in relation to the European Union is effectively that of protectorates of a modern-day empire, meaning that these countries’ ability to retain a degree of autonomy in running their own affairs has been severely compromised by the demands of European integration. And you can find examples of that in practically every domain of governance – from foreign policy and education, to social issues, public administration reforms, even constitutional matters, policymakers in the Western Balkans are expected to comply with the advice of EU institutions far more than it is the case in any member-State. And, what’s more, our elected representatives regularly act as though the bureaucrats in the European Commission must automatically have a better grasp of how to solve our countries’ problems than we do.
Looking at the current state, have our own political elites contributed to getting us into this neo-colonial power relation with the EU by speaking and acting the way they do?
Now, if this rings true, then I propose to ask how exactly did our countries get themselves into this kind of position? Namely, how much of this power relation that we’re currently in vis-a-vis the EU was unavoidable – something that, you might say, we’ve signed up for the moment we decided to conclude our Stabilisation and Association Agreements with the EU? How much of it is legally preordained, and how much is politics – a result of our own political conduct over the years?
Here’s the question. Looking at the current state, have our own political elites contributed to getting us into this neo-colonial power relation with the EU by speaking and acting the way they do? By consistently framing issues in a way that perpetuates a power dynamics in which we construe ourselves as being inherently barbarian, unable to govern ourselves with minimal competence without oversight from a benevolent Western master? So that the path towards EU membership becomes, in our minds, not just an objective that we pragmatically judge to be in our interest, but something more fundamental – something akin to becoming civilised, and, as such, in a way, the ultimate end purpose of our countries’ existence? And if that’s, at least, part of the problem, then, if we want to change things – if indeed we wish to ‘decolonise’ our current power relation with the EU – shouldn’t we first of all try to decolonise our own thinking?
That’s food for thought. If you have any insights you’d like to share, I invite you to leave a comment below.
Feđa Pavlović 