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Nationalism and the ‘idiocy’ of

the countryside: The case of
Serbia
a
Sabrina Petra Ramet
a
Professor, HMJ School of International Studies ,
University of Washington , Thomson Hall DR‐05,
Seattle, WA, 98195, USA
Published online: 13 Sep 2010.

To cite this article: Sabrina Petra Ramet (1996) Nationalism and the ‘idiocy’ of
the countryside: The case of Serbia, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 19:1, 70-87, DOI:
10.1080/01419870.1996.9993899

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 Nationalism and the 'idiocy' of the
countryside: the case of Serbia

Sabrina Petra Ramet

Abstract
The mobilization of the countryside has direct consequences for political
discourse about national values and in times of social crisis, the 'conservatism'
of the countryside has the potential to assume an aggressive, offensive pos-
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ture. When rural mobilization is accompanied by religious revival, group

loyalty and so-called 'traditional' values are sacralized. When rural mobiliza-
tion, ethnic mobilization, and religious revival occur simultaneously, it signi-
fies that the society is undergoing profound destabilization. Examining the
case of Serbia, this article argues that while Serbia is, in cultural and social
terms, predominantly rural in character, Titoist Communism imposed the
values of the city on that culture, while the 1987 coup by Slobodan Milosevic
represented, among other things, the triumph of the countryside over the
city in Serbia.
This article begins by characterizing the countryside in cultural terms,
provides documentation of the importance of rural traditions in Serbian
society, documents the rural character of the Serbian national movement,
connecting its ideology and behaviour with populist appeals, and examines
the contribution made by the Serbian Orthodox Church to the mobilization
of the Serbian countryside.

Keywords: Nationalism; rural values; urban-rural cleavage; Serbia; ethnic

mobilization; traditional values.

Speak Serbian and the whole world understands

(Traditional Serbian folk saying)

I am concerned in this essay with the relationship between the urban-

rural dichotomy and nationalism, and with points of contact between
traditional-rural values and nationalist values. I shall argue, specifically,
that the mobilization of the countryside has direct consequences for
political discourse about national values and that in times of social
crisis, the 'conservatism' of the countryside has the potential to assume
an aggressive, offensive posture.
Examining the case of Serbia, I shall argue that while Serbia is, in
cultural and social terms, predominantly rural in character, Titoist

Ethnic and Racial Studies Volume 19 Number 1 January 1996

© Routledge 1996 0141-9870
 Nationalism and rural 'idiocy ' in Serbia 71
Communism imposed the values of the city on that culture, and that
the 1987 coup by Slobodan Milosevic represented, among other
things, the triumph of the countryside over the city in Serbia. And
hence, the rising tide of Serbian nationalism, which can be dated to
just prior to Milosevic's coup, is closely associated with rural percep-
tions and rural values, albeit often as synthesized and reflected by
urban literary élites.

The 'idiotic' values of the countryside

It was Karl Marx, of course, who first used the expression, 'the idiocy
of the countryside'. By this he meant to suggest that the countryside
was the hearth of hopelessly traditional, even reactionary values, that
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all progressive values were associated with the urban proletariat and
the urban radical intelligentsia, and that historical progress could only
mean the displacement of rural values and ways of life by those of the
city.
I am, however, using the phrase in a different sense - a sense much
closer to Christopher Berry's use. Berry points out, specifically, that
the word 'idiotic' comes from the ancient Greek, idios, meaning private,
and contrasts this with the 'political' or communal. Berry uses the term
to criticize patriarchal society which, he says, conditions women to
concern themselves with private or family matters, to be inward-look-
ing, leaving politics to the men (Berry 1989). In this sense, the country-
side is indeed 'idiotic': the concerns of the village are for the harvest,
for the neighbourhood, for the local roads, for the stability of social
mores. Needless to say, when the countryside is mobilized, there is a
danger that its leaders will see the nation as the village-writ-large, and
adopt the mores of the village as their model for the nation.
The countryside is also 'idiotic' in a second sense. Certainly in coun-
tries with peasant populations (such as Serbia), the countryside - the
peasantry - has defined itself (at least during certain periods, if not on
a stable basis) in opposition to the city. Hence, rural claims to be more
pure than the city; to preserve the old values which the city has sullied,
and so forth. So far, so good. But the 'idiocy' consists in a latent
contradiction which does not lie much below the surface, viz., in the
ultimate dependence of the culture and way of life of the countryside
on the very city it abhors. As Redfield notes,

[T]he culture of a peasant community . . . is not autonomous. It is

an aspect or dimension of the civilization of which it is a part. As
the peasant society is a half-society, so the peasant culture is a
half-culture [Hence,] to maintain itself peasant culture requires
continual communication to the local community of thought originat-
ing outside of it. The intellectual and often the religious and moral
 72 Sabrina Petra Ramet
life of the peasant village is perpetually incomplete (Redfield 1956,
p. 68).

While agreeing with this general approach, Fentress and Wickham

emphasize that peasant communities often rely on 'local traditional
intellectuals' to mediate between the urban centre and the village, and
add that the countryside is only selectively receptive to outside influ-
ence, assimilating only those elements congruous with the pre-existing
cultural framework (Fentress and Wickham 1992, pp. 114-15).
Yet in spite of the cultural dependence of the countryside on the
city (the reverse exists to a much lesser degree, if at all), the nature
of communal solidarity in the countryside and in the city is quite
different, even where the same overarching label is used. One of the
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reasons for this is that the countryside is far removed from the centre
of power and hence from identification with the state, which it tends
to see as external and superordinate. At the same time, the countryside
is the domain of the small community, sensitive to any 'incursions'
from outside, all of which tend to be viewed as foreign, though the
degree of perceived 'foreignness' varies, depending on whether the out-
sider is only from the next village or from an entirely different national-
ity and region. This phenomenon has only been partly attentuated by
the spread of television.
The city, by contrast, with its ethnic and cultural heterogeneity, tends
inevitably to be more cosmopolitan, which is to say, less 'ethnic' (less
oriented to the ethnos), and by the same virtue, more 'civic', that is,
more oriented towards the community in its political aspect. With
additional levels of religious and sexual heterogeneity, the city also has
some built-in factors that encourage social tolerance, while in the
countryside the much lower levels of heterogeneity dispose the local
population to social ignorance and unconscious intolerance. One might
say that the countryside tends to accept the (populist) premise that
'moral consensus rules, or, in different language, [that] society is and
should be a self-righteous moral tyranny' (MacRae 1969, p. 160). The
city is, of course, well aware of its political power, and views the
political apparatus as much as protector as oppressor. We might thus
say that whereas ethnic values predominate in the countryside, civic
values predominate in the city. Or, to put it another way, the country-
side traditionally teaches one what it is to be a good national, while
the city teaches one what it is to be a good citizen. This contrast loses
some of its utility when one examines urban-rural comparisons in
certain advanced industrialized societies such as Austria and Germany,
but describes all too accurately social realities in Serbia, and, for that
matter, in the United States as well.
In communist Yugoslavia, the THoist programme was archetypally
of the city. The emphasis on self-management (a model of decision-
 Nationalism and rural 'idiocy' in Serbia 73
making drawn from a specifically industrial context), like the
accompanying efforts to promote secularism, gender equality, and
ethnic coexistence all undercut the ethos of the village. They were, in
fact, quite consciously viewed as directed towards the destruction of
the traditional culture of the countryside.
The result of this difference is that the countryside is the true hearth
of nationalism, and tends to be more concerned about threats to the
nation (especially by incursions of 'foreigners'). This has certainly been
true of Serbia, where talk of peril to the Serbian nation originated
among the Serbs of rural Kosovo, who trekked to Belgrade on several
occasions between 1986 and 1989 to tell their story to the politicians
and public in the capital. The city, by contrast, is the hearth of patriot-
ism, and tends to be more concerned about threats to the constitution
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and civic order. In times of stress, these alternative modes tend to

become antagonistic.

Rural life in Serbia

Despite the myth of age-old tradition, which is usually perceived as
having been changeless until 'recently' ('recently' being forever
redefined), the countryside undergoes its own flux and evolution, in
organic connection with the city. Peasant communities usually adhere
to some variant of the belief in a traditional way of life which has
existed from 'time immemorial'. This interpretation is largely wishful
thinking for the countryside is not immune to cultural drifts, demo-
graphic movements, or economic changes. The case of Serbia illustrates
this quite well.
As recently as the beginning of the nineteenth century, much of
central Serbia consisted of oak forests. Agriculture was a secondary
pursuit. The primary source of income in Serbia at that time was pig-
raising. Only later, in the course of colonization from Bosnia and
Montenegro, together with indigenous population growth, did extensive
deforestation occur, giving rise to plough agriculture (Halperin 1961,
pp. 166-67). The colonization of central Serbia meant, at first, the
flowering of the zadruga, that is, of the extended family, often with a
highly developed division of labour within the extended family itself.
The extended family ate together, according to protocols fixed by
patriarchal custom (Denich 1974, p. 253), and in rural Serbia, women
and girls enjoyed markedly lower status than males in all spheres of
life (Tomasic 1948, pp. 58-59; see also Woodward, 1985).
But already before the end of the nineteenth century, a contrary
process had set in, as the pressures of the rising market economy
induced the gradual, but steady disintegration of the zadruga system
alongside other changes in rural organization (Bicanic 1944, p. 43).
However, these changes in the countryside did not entail rural
 74 Sabrina Petra Ramet
depopulation. On the contrary, rural overpopulation has been a recur-
rent problem in Serbia until relatively recently. Thus, for example,
while 77 per cent of the population was engaged in agriculture in 1940,
renowned economist Rudolf Bicanic has speculated that more than a
third of Yugoslavia's rural population of 12 million in that year could
have been withdrawn from agriculture without any negative effect on
production or output (Bicanic 1944, pp. 31, 41).
Serbia, in fact, was late in experiencing economic development, by
European standards, and was culturally and politically primitive
through most of the nineteenth century, with only the barest hints of
the beginnings of urban growth. Serbia's 'late start' is easily docu-
mented. The population of Belgrade, Serbia's capital, was only 25,000
in 1800, and actually declined by 1850, to less than 15,000. Even in
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1914 Belgrade numbered less than 100,000 inhabitants (Dragnich 1978,

p. 6). By contrast, in neighbouring Hungary, the city of Pest had some
64,000 inhabitants by 1840, and by 1848, already counted some 100,000
inhabitants (Deak 1979, p. 50). In early nineteenth-century Serbia,
moreover, there was essentially no industry. Glass windows and mirrors
were rare enough in Belgrade and unknown outside the city. As Drag-
nich notes,

[TJables and chairs were nonexistent even in the ruler's household

except in his offices, and even he slept on the floor until 1834.
Tableware was non-existent or scarce. Even in the so-called palace,
metal dishes and wooden spoons were used to eat from as late as
1834. Communications, except for some riverboat traffic, were vir-
tually nonexistent. There were a few primitive roads and trails which
were used by those who had horses or oxen (Dragnich 1978, p. 7).

Moreover, in 1844, at the time of the promulgation of a Civil Code,

there was only one judge in all of Serbia who possessed a law degree,
only fifteen judges had more than an elementatry education, twenty-
four other judges were illiterate, and a further twenty-four could sign
their names but were otherwise also illiterate. Needless to say, 'the
situation with lawyers was even worse. In fact, most of the law work
was done by individual civil servants when their regular duties permit-
ted. These were in the main court secretaries and clerks' (Dragnich
1978, p. 25). Teachers were held in poor regard by the population, and
their pay was low and irregular. Within this context, the development
of anything like a civic culture was severely hampered.
Prince Milos Obrenovic made a fateful decision in the 1830s when,
instead of distributing lands vacated by the Turks to friends and rela-
tives - which might have laid the basis for a landed aristocracy - he
divided them, rather, among the peasantry. The absence of a landed
aristocracy would make a significant difference for the further political
 Nationalism and rural 'idiocy ' in Serbia 75
and social evolution of Serbia. Elsewhere in Europe, the landed aristoc-
racy proved to be a force not only for conservatism, but also for
stability. The lack of a traditional landed aristocracy may well have
been a factor contributing to the instability of interwar Yugoslavia,
thus aggravating other problems.
At the time when the interwar Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slov-
enes (Yugoslavia) was established, agriculture accounted for 86.1 per
cent of the social product. According to the census of 31 March 1931,
81.3 per cent of the population was employed in farming ('Jugoslavia'
1960, pp. 640-42). By 1971 only .40.6 per cent of the Yugoslav popu-
lation was engaged in private farming, but interestingly enough, of
Yugoslavia's six constituent republics, Serbia recorded the highest pro-
portion of active labour force engaged in private agriculture: 53.5 per
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cent versus 46.1 per cent for Bosnia, 31.7 per cent for Croatia and 18.2
per cent for Slovenia (Schrenk et al. 1979, p. 34). And while the pro-
portion of the population engaged in agriculture declined for all six
Yugoslav republics, it declined the most slowly for Serbia, as the figures
in Table 1 make clear.

Table 1. Proportion of total population engaged in agriculture (by Republic)

YUGO BOSN MONT CROA MACE SLOV SERB SERB/P KOS VOJ
1948 67.2 71.8 71.6 62.4 70.6 44.1 72.3 72.4 80.9 68.1
1953 60.9 62.2 61.5 56.4 62.7 41.1 66.7 67.2 72.4 62.9
1961 49.6 50.2 47.0 43.9 51.3 31.1 56.1 56.2 64.2 51.8
1971 38.2 40.0 35.0 32.3 39.9 20.4 44.0 44.1 51.5 39.0
1981 19.9 17.3 13.5 15.2 21.7 9.4 25.4 27.6 24.6 19.9
SERB1 = Serbian Republic including Kosovo anc1 Vojvodina
SERB/P = Serbia-proper (i.e., without Kosovo and Vojvodina)
Source: Statisticki Godisnjak Jugoslavije 1989, vol. 36 (Belgrade: Savezni Zavod za Statis-
tiku, 1989), p. 453.

The proportion of persons living in small villages would, of course, be

higher than the figure for occupation in agriculture.
Illiteracy provides yet another measure of the persistence of rural
patterns. Here it is interesting that as recently as 1981, 10.8 per cent
of the population of Serbia and Montenegro was recorded as officially
illiterate. For the age group '50 and above', the figure was 27.2 per
cent that year (Statisticki Godisnjak 1992, p. 51).

The rural character of the Serbian national movement

In the preceding section, I endeavoured to show inter alia that the
rural sector (and hence also rural culture) remains significant in con-
temporary Serbia, and that its enduring salience is part and parcel of
Serbia's slower start in developing urban centres, indigenous industry,
 76 Sabrina Petra Ramet
urban culture and civic values. In this section, I intend to show that
the nationalist movement which made rapid gains in Serbia after the
death of Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito in May 1980, and which
came into its own in 1987, relies above all on rural support and is, in
essence, a profoundly rural phenomenon. To say this is also to suggest
that Milosevic's ascent to power represented the victory of the Serbian
countryside over the city, that is, over Belgrade, because in heartland
Serbia, there is no other city of comparable culture and/or political
importance.
The Titoist formula, which evolved over the course of Tito's thirty-
five years in power and which remained the official line for another
seven years after his death, held up work relations elaborated in an
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urban setting (self-management) as a model for work relations and

political relations in town and country alike. Titoist politics was hostile
to the political aspects of traditional culture, and made strong efforts to
overcome traditional-rural prejudice against women, to erode the
political authority of the Churches (always strongest in the
countryside), and to anathematize all manifestations of nationalist sen-
timent, especially when translated into political programmes or
demands. Churches were repeatedly advised that religion was a 'private
affair of the individual', meaning that the Churches had no business
taking part in public debate or voicing their views about public matters.
Church engagement in nationalist activity was especially taboo,
although this taboo was violated from time to time (P. Ramet 1989).
More generally, politics in Tito's day, and for that matter, for several
years into the post-Tito era, was largely shaped by three cities:
Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubljana. Even the decentralization of the
1960s and 1970s did not affect the domination of this troika; on
the contrary, it accentuated and reinforced it.
In Tito's day, the communist party held that the national question
in Yugoslavia had been 'solved', though they sometimes added the
tell-tale qualifier, 'in principle'. Reality was not so simple for, although
different nationalities did live side-by-side in often tranquil and some-
times harmonious relations, the inter-ethnic equilibrium repeatedly
broke down: in 1968 in Kosovo and western Macedonia; in 1970-71 in
Croatia and Bosnia; in 1981 in Kosovo, etc.
The Serbian national 'reawakening' of the late 1980s and early 1990s
must be traced to Kosovo, which had been ruled by ethnic Serbs tied
to secret police chief Aleksandar Rankovic (a Serb himself) 1945-66,
by an unstable coalition of local Serbs after the fall of Rankovic
1966-68, and increasingly by members of the local Albanian majority
1968-81. Albanians, who accounted for some 80 per cent of the provin-
cial population in 1981, had long been numerically preponderant in
both the cities and the countryside, and now held the reins of local
 Nationalism and rural 'idiocy' in Serbia 77
power too. But there were numerous Serbian enclaves, mostly rural,
where resentments against Albanian 'usurpation' were being nurtured.
In this context, it is important to bear in mind that from 1981 until
the end of 1987, it was the peasant Serbs of rural Kosovo who were
playing the largest role in setting the nationalist agenda and engaging in
mass actions designed to change Belgrade's policies vis-à-vis Kosovo's
Albanians. Milosevic, then only second in command within the Serbian
party, became converted to the nationalist cause in April 1987 when
he visited Kosovo and met with local Serbs. It was only with Milosevic's
coup later that year that Serbian nationalism, hitherto being promoted
in the first place by rural Serbs from Kosovo, finally acquired a spon-
sor in Belgrade.
The mobilization of the Serbian rural population of Kosovo after
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1981 (documented in S.P. Ramet 1995a, ch. 8) provided Milosevic with

a ready-made audience for a populist appeal. Populism is a variant of
nationalism, distinguished by its equation of 'the nation' and 'the
people', or more exactly, the 'simple people' (Stewart 1969, p. 183).
Populism, which following Peter Wiles may be defined here as 'any
creed or movement based on the following premise: virtue resides in
the simple people, who are the overwhelming majority, and in their
collective traditions' (Wiles 1969, p. 166) is, in a word, the manner
in which nationalism emerges in the countryside. And a mobilized
countryside of necessity seeks to remake the nation in its own image,
that is, in the image of a village! But what enabled the countryside to
subjugate (though not convert) the city in Serbia was that a portion
of the urban élite (especially in the Writers' Union) shared in this
'longing for a return to village life as the only authentic life' (Vreme
1993, p. 57).
Serbia's slow urbanization and present social structure certainly
helped to set the context for this rural-based national movement, as
did the fact that some of the key literature came from, or celebrated,
the countryside - Popovic's Book about Milutin (Popovic 1986) being
an excellent example. Quite naturally, the movement arose in the
countryside, being stirred up by rural Serbs from Kosovo (sometimes
led by Kosta Bulatovic) in the first place (as already noted). It was the
countryside which provided the recruits for Milosevic's mobs which, in
the course of 1988-89, literally overthrew the governments of Vojvod-
ina, Kosovo, and Montenegro, just as it is rural concentrations of Serbs
in Croatia and Bosnia who have done most of the fighting in the
present inter-ethnic war. Moreover, Milosevic's much-touted 'anti-
bureaucratic revolution' - sometimes dismissed by Western observers
as a cheap propaganda trick - was, in fact, a well-calculated appeal to
the anti-state temperament of the rural population, in this case, of
course, rural Serbs.
Building on its rural base, the Serbian national movement has even
 78 Sabrina Petra Ramet
now failed to convert Belgrade. Thus, polls taken by various agencies
have repeatedly shown that Milosevic's electoral successes have been
built on solid (albeit now partially eroding) support from rural Serbs,
while the anti-Milosevic, anti-war opposition has remained largely a
Belgrade phenomenon. The only exception to this is the Serbian Rad-
ical Party of Vojislav Seselj, most of whose support is also rural; but
Seselj, like Milosevic, is a confirmed nationalist and is committed to
the territorial expansion of the Serbian state. In fact, the Belgrade
independent weekly, Vreme, wrote in 1993 of 'a real war [which] is
beginning between [rural] Serbia and Belgrade', and suggested that
Milosevic's programme had the potential 'to threaten the urban order'
of Belgrade (Vreme 1993, p. 57).
The rural character of the Serbian national movement explains the
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movement's 'traditional' values, which are stridently anti-feminist,

strongly oriented towards the Serbian Orthodox Church, and laced
with xenophobia: in short, the paradigmatic 'traditional' values that one
associates with the countryside. It is also significant that the increase in
inter-ethnic violence that had already begun in earnest in 1990 was
accompanied by a simultaneous increase in wife-beating in Serbia (see
Korac 1993, pp. 109-110; S.P. Ramet 1995a, p. 449). The rural tie also
explains the nature of the threat initially painted by the Serbian
national movement, in the years 1986-89, that is, in the incipient phase
of the movement, namely, the supposed threat posed by the Albanian
majority in Kosovo to local rural Serbs.1
Wiles (1969) has described (rural) populism as a syndrome, in which
he has identified, inter alia, an emphasis on morality and correct atti-
tude rather than efficiency; a stress on the leader's alleged simplicity,
whether in language, manner, attire, or lifestyle (something emphati-
cally pointed out to me, in connection with Milosevic, by several per-
sons I interviewed in Belgrade in 1989); ideological nebulousness
(clearly a feature of the Serbian national movement, which has no
programme other than that all Serbs should live in the same state);
anti-intellectualism, even among the intellectuals (a tendency
reinforced, in Serbia's case, by the wholesale flight of its intellectuals
and artists since 1991 - some 120,000 of Serbia's best-educated people
left between 1989 and 1993 (Dyker and Bojicic 1993, p. 52)); an anti-
establishment posture (Milosevic's 'anti-bureaucratic revolution' has
already been noted); demonization of enemies, especially foreigners
and financiers, and most especially foreign financiers (in the Serbian
variation, the US, Germany and the Vatican are demonized for their
alleged conspiracy to break up Yugoslavia and support Croatia);
acceptance of inequalities produced by traditional institutions (e.g., of
gender inequality, in the Serbian case); religiosity and the espousal
of 'traditional' values, but frequently associated with antipathy towards
the religious establishment (this feature again reflected in Serbia, where
 Nationalism and rural 'idiocy ' in Serbia 79
nationalists celebrate the Serbianness of their Church but reject the
anti-war posture of the Church hierarchy); a nostalgic orientation to
past glories and sufferings, to the point of mythologizing the past (a
feature graphically illustrated in the mythologization of the 1389 Battle
of Kosovo and of the sufferings of Serbs during World War II); and
racialism (an orientation quite clearly illustrated in the Serbian authori-
ties' suppression of Albanian-language media and education in Kosovo,
and of Hungarian-language media in Vojvodina, and systematic conver-
sion of Albanian-place names in Kosovo to Serbian ones) (Wiles 1969,
pp. 167-70).
Richard Hofstadter's theory of populism partly overlaps, partly sup-
plements, Wiles's theory. What Hofstadter adds amounts to two
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elements: a ideological view of history in which one's own nation

figures as the great martyr; and a conspiracy theory (cited in Minogue
1969, p. 30). That these two features are also amply exemplified in the
Serbian case should be clear enough already. Yet it is interesting to
see anthropologist Dinko Tomasic write in 1948, that the Serbs

. . . like to see themselves as great martyrs, as well as great heroes.

In their ballads and in their school textbooks they present themselves
as people who have been unjustly persecuted by their enemies, and
who have suffered to save the world, but without being rewarded
for it. In that respect they tend to identify themselves with Christ,
and talk in terms of 'crucifixion' and 'resurrection'. This ability to
glory in martyrdom, for instance, enabled the Dinaric Serbs in the
past to convert great national tragedies into a psychological force
that has worked in the direction of a national renaissance (Tomasic
1948, p. 30).

In this connection, it is perhaps advisable to add a caution that it is

the revival of historical memories that creates and revives supposedly
fixed patterns of behaviour, not the other way around, as is sometimes
supposed. The contemporary Serbian claim to be defending an ungrate-
ful Christian Europe from a Muslim onslaught, although parallel to
the Serbs' posturing in the nineteenth century (when the myth of
Kosovo, in something like its present form, was actually created
(Karpat 1993, p. 384)2) is specifically linked to the contemporary
nationalist revival and to the manipulation of the Kosovo myth
specifically.

The politics of rural nationalism

Rural nationalism is different from urban-based or class-based
nationalism in certain ways. Putting it another way, one may say that
there is a fundamental difference between rural mobilization in a
 80 Sabrina Petra Ramet
society dominated by the capital city (such as Serbia) and that occur-
ring in a more urbanized and diversified society (such as Poland). This
is because societies dominated by a single city are typically societies
with a greater proportion of rural population than societies with a
number of major cities; in the latter, political agendas may be the
product of pressures emanating from several cities, and from their
rivalry. Moreover, in societies dominated by a single city, it is much
easier to conflate anti-urban with anti-government attitudes.
There is also the issue of numbers. Indeed, one may speculate that
the greater the proportion of rural population in a country, the more
introverted, the more exclusive, and the less tolerant of minority
nationalities and minority religions the society will be. This proposition
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alerts one to the dangers inherent in rural mobilization, and to the

content of any nationalist discourse based on rural mobilization. It also
suggests, by highlighting the introversion of the countryside, that a
society with a predominantly rural population will tend to be more
oriented to past history, past sufferings and injustices, and to values
rooted in the past.
But in turn, because of this orientation, the political mobilization of
the countryside is always fraught with danger and can only intensify
social polarization and reinforce existing tendencies towards chauvin-
ism. This is a direct consequence of the fact that in most societies, and
especially in largely peasant societies, high politics is usually the pre-
serve of the cities, leaving rural political culture less developed, and
less sophisticated, than its urban counterparts. In most societies, too,
the more intolerant religions tend to have their strength in the country-
side - in the American case, in the deep South (Stark and Bainbridge
1985). This factor contributes to making the countryside a repository
of chauvinism in many, if not all, countries - and most certainly in
today's Eastern Europe.
It is not only because of the chauvinist element that rural mobiliza-
tion has the potential for provoking crisis, even strife. As Milton Esman
has observed:

[I]t is an axiom of contemporary political thought that the weak can

be empowered only when they succeed in capitalizing on their
superior numbers by organization - cultural, economic, or political.
But effective organization is likely, sooner or later, to produce con-
frontational tactics. Such tactics are inherently risky and dangerous
even when they are nonviolent... (Esman 1989, p. 226).

Thus, for example, the formally non-violent mass demonstrations by

rural Serbs against the governments of Novi Sad, Pristina, and Titograd
(Podgorica) in 1988 were elements in a larger process of escalation
 Nationalism and rural 'idiocy' in Serbia 81
towards violence and played their role in setting the stage for the
outbreak of inter-ethnic strife in 1991.
In theory, the potential for widespread strife is sown into the urban-
rural divide itself. For the dominant mood in the countryside is one of
resentment. As long as this resentment is directed towards the city, a
society is at peace. When it is directed towards landlords, the risk of
rioting increases. When resentment is channelled along ethnic lines,
ethnic antagonism soon gains primacy over the rural-urban chasm. As
Liah Greenfeld has noted, adopting the French spelling:

The sociological basis for ressentiment - or the structural conditions

that are necessary for the development of this psychological state -
is twofold. The first condition (the structural basis of envy itself) is
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the fundamental comparability between the subject and the object

of envy, or rather the belief on the part of the subject in the funda-
mental equality between them, which makes them in principle inter-
changeable. The second condition is the actual inequality (perceived
as not fundamental) of such dimensions that it rules out practical
achievement of the theoretically existing equality (Greenfeld 1992,
pp. 15-16).

Rural resentment against the city is, one might say, the benign form
of this phenomenon, and rarely leads to major difficulties, although
peasant withholding of foodstuffs from Russian cities during the civil
war 1918-21 (which reflected both anti-urban and anti-Bolshevik
sentiment) figures as an important example of this type (Dobb 1928,
pp. 109-110). But explosions of rural anger against landlords have
repeatedly occurred as a side-effect of the breakdown of civil order.
The pattern of peasant revolts in eighteenth-century Europe illustrates
this principle quite adequately. The peasant revolt on the Great Hun-
garian Plain in 1765-66, for instance, was provoked by an increase in
seignorial obligations, and led directly to a code regulating the lord-
peasant relationship (imposed by Empress Maria Theresa in 1767)
(Blum 1978, p. 223). There were peasant revolts in both Saxony and
Hungary in 1790, in both cases because of efforts by the nobles to roll
back earlier concessions to the peasants (Blum 1978, pp. 218, 342). As
Blum notes,

. . . when peasants rose it was nearly always because of a specific

grievance, whether rising out of the relationship between lord and
peasant, or from other circumstances. They did not revolt because
they wanted to destroy the hierarchical order of privilege that held
them in their servitude (Blum 1978, pp. 346-47).

With a few very striking exceptions (such as Pugachev's rebellion in

 82 Sabrina Petra Ramet
Russia), it is the conservatism of peasant thinking, peasant values and
peasant revolts which is so clear. Two further examples (these, from
the nineteenth century) will make this point even clearer. In Galicia,
for example, the Polish gentry rose in revolt against Austrian occu-
pation in 1846, only to find that the peasants, including both Poles and
Ukrainians, armed themselves and rose against the gentry class, their
tangible oppressors, thereby defending the Austrians. In the course of
the ensuing jacquerie, peasants killed about 1,100 landlords and estate
staff, and plundered some 430 manors (Leslie 1963, pp. 18-20). In
Hungary, in 1848, the Romanian peasants who rallied to the counter-
revolutionary banner of Baron-General Anton Puchner of Transyl-
vania, were attracted, at least in part, by the licence that this would
give them to attack Magyar landlords (Deak 1979, pp. 207-10).
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When rural mobilization takes the form of ethnic mobilization, its

effect will vary according to ethnic distribution. Where urban-dwellers
tend to be of one ethnic stock and rural-dwellers of another (e.g., in
Bosnia-Herzegovina during the Ottoman occupation and in Central
Asia, to some extent, during much of this century), the effect will be
to reinforce and deepen rural-urban antagonisms. But where both town
and countryside are ethnically mixed, as in Kosovo, the effect will be
to break down the possibility of rural solidarity by strengthening ethnic
identities.
In Kosovo, of course, the countryside includes both Serbs and Alban-
ians. As Serbs were mobilized against Albanians, patterns of social
avoidance hardened and deepened, to the extent that Serbs and Alban-
ians took to walking on different sides of Pristina's streets and avoided
using elevators in each other's company. Such avoidance behaviour
may escalate, leading to civil strife - a fear on many people's minds
in today's Kosovo.

Religious revival and social memory

Religious revival, if it occurs during a period of rural mobilization, will
tend to emphasize group loyalty and conservative ('traditional') values.
Needless to say, when rural mobilization, ethnic mobilization, and
religious revival occur simultaneously, it can only mean that the society
is undergoing profound destabilization, and in such conditions, this
triadic mobilization has the potential for extreme danger.
In Serbia, religious revival began slowly, even gingerly, around 1982,
marked by the Serbian Orthodox Church's issuance of an 'Appeal for
the Protection of the Serbian People of Kosovo and Their Holy
Shrines'. It was nationalism which provided the initial spark for the
Orthodox religious revival, and it is nationalism which has energized
it thus far. Religion and nationalism have often proved to be natural
partners, each strengthening and reinforcing the other. Fidelity to the
 Nationalism and rural 'idiocy ' in Serbia 83
religion becomes the badge of one's nationalism; and nationalism, in
turn, becomes a 'holy cause'. That a species of religio-nationalist unity
came about in Serbia is clear enough from the pages of the Serbian
Patriarchate's newspaper, Pravoslavlje, which, during 1991 and 1992,
enthusiastically celebrated the Serbian irregulars' advances into Croa-
tian territory.
Religious organizations often play a powerful role in shaping a
people's understanding of itself and of its history. This has most cer-
tainly been true in Serbia. Furthermore, in part - but only in part -
because of the Church's greater influence in the village, the social
memory of the past differs from the countryside to the city. And
because of rural resentment, the countryside is apt to have a more
traumatic view of the past than the city. Eugen Weber, in a recent
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article, portrays nationalism as 'part of the store of stereotypes into

which modern societies dip in moments of stress'. But if nationalism
is awakened by stress, it is given its configuration by evoked memories.
'As in a family quarrel,' Weber continues, 'minor issues or major dis-
agreements are seldom debated in present context only, but rather
they are debated in historical perspective' (Weber 1994, p. 422). Con-
versely, as Fentress and Wickham point out, 'events . . . tend to be
remembered in the first place because of their power to legitimize the
present, and tend to be interpreted in ways that very closely parallel
(often competing) present conceptions of the world' (Fentress and
Wickham 1992, p. 88). Since city and countryside seek to legitimize
different things, and in any case nourish differing conceptions of the
world, it is inevitable that social memory will likewise differ from
the city to the countryside. In the case of rural Kosovo, it need scarcely
be added that the battle of 1389 will be perceived somewhat differently
by those living close to where it took place, from the way it will be
recalled by those living in Belgrade.

Political forces in nationalist Serbia

If one were to enumerate the chief political forces in Serbia, a simpli-
fied list might embrace the following: Milosevic's regime, including the
Serbian Socialist Party; the army, operating up to now as Milosevic's
ally and, auspiciously, subjected to an extensive purge by Milosevic in
August 1993 (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 1993, p. 7); the political opposition
(a broad and disparate set embracing Draskovic's Serbian Renaissance
Party, Djindjic's Democratic Party, and Seselj's Serbian Radical Party);
intellectuals (especially the members of the Serbian Writers' Associ-
ation and of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Art); the Serbian
Orthodox Church hierarchy and clergy (not always acting in accord
with each other); the Serbian countryside; the Albanians of Kosovo;
the Hungarians and other non-Serbs of the Vojvodina; university
 84 Sabrina Petra Ramet
students and other politically active inhabitants of Belgrade; and the
increasingly important Serbian Mafia, often acting in collusion with
Milosevic. Whether this list is sufficiently complete or subtle to account
for Serbian political reality does not concern me here; my only point
in enumerating these forces is to make it clear that the Serbian country-
side must share the stage with many other forces, operating at diverse
and often intersecting levels. Moreover, all of these forces, except the
seventh and eighth, have made their contributions to stoking the fires
of Serbian nationalism. The intellectuals, for example, played a vital
role in this regard by drawing up a seventy-four page Memorandum
in September 1986, which claimed that the Serbs had been victimized
by the Titoist system,3 and by their escalation of polemics with the
Slovenian Writers' Association in the latter half of 1989 (see S.P. Ramet
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1995b, ch. 2).

But for all that, it is the Serbian countryside which has, to a consider-
able extent, shaped the issues of contestation. In 1989 Serb-Slovene
polemics focused on the question of the legitimacy of the grievances
of the Serbian countryside in Kosovo and of the Serbian government's
response to them. In 1990-91, violence escalated, in the first place, in
the Serb-inhabited countryside in Croatia, and in confrontations
between rural Serbs and Croats in the republic of Croatia. Further-
more, Milosevic and the army prepared the way for war by arming
and training rural Serb militias in Croatia and Bosnia (details and
documentation in Magas 1993, p. 311; and S.P. Ramet 1991). And still
further, the renewed campaign for 'traditional values' - meaning in
the first place a full-scale assault on any claims by women to equal
dignity or equal treatment - represents in the clearest possible way, a
cultural encroachment of the countryside on the city.
By highlighting the role of the Serbian countryside in the nationalist
awakening, I have also tried to offer an alternative to the common
Western view that all these troubles in former Yugoslavia are the fault
of the politicians, and to suggest that a more complex depiction may
be necessary. One may say, moreover, that the causal relationship
between fissiparous nationalism in Yugoslavia 1986-91 and the disinte-
gration of the federation was not unidirectional. On the contrary, the
steady disintegration of the federation provided in itself a powerful
impetus to the intensification of Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian
nationalisms.
It is quite clear, indeed generally recognized by writers on the subject
(Gellner 1983; Smith 1991), that nationalism is not necessarily or intrin-
sically a rural phenomenon. Indeed, Gellner and Smith associate the
growth of nationalism with processes of industrialization and urbaniza-
tion. Certainly, the Hungarian nationalist upsurge of the nineteenth
century was largely centred in Budapest, while the Czech national
movement of that era was a product of the towns and cities generally
 Nationalism and rural 'idiocy'in Serbia 85
which is where Czechs and Germans came into competitive contact
(Wiskemann 1967, especially chs 5 and 7). But there is a world of
difference between a national movement founded on urban mobiliza-
tion (even if it manipulates the symbols and mythologies of the
countryside, in its own distorted mirror) and a national movement
based, to a great extent, on rural mobilization. From the standpoint of
the potential for chauvinist excesses, for the suspension of any notions
of tolerance and for excesses of violence, the latter, rural mobilization,
is, as Eugen Weber has noted (Weber 1994, pp. 422-23), the more
dangerous.
Attention to the rural factor in nationalist revivals can assist in
producing a more accurate and more nuanced interpretation of the
roots of nationalist tensions, processes of ethnic mobilization, the
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manipulation of symbologies, and the nature of anti-nationalist and

pacifist oppositions, and assist in tracing the etiology of xenophobia
and aggressive neo-traditionalism.

Notes
1. In so far as peasants are defined, as a class, by their attachment to these 'traditional
values', and especially to patriarchal values, and in so far as waxing rural populism tends
to be associated with attacks on feminism and gender equality, it follows that the
populist-nationalist temper will be aggravated by differences in gender relations in
the perceived 'enemy'. It follows, further, that allegations of sexual infractions - like the
Serbian allegations of Albanian rape of Serbian women, 1986-89 - may be highly
effective in inflaming rural resentments.
2. Until recently, Serbian historiography recorded that the battle had been a Serbian
and Christian victory over Muslim Turks. It is only since 1968, thanks at least in part to
historian G. Ostrogorski's portrayal of the event, that the construal of the battle as a
great Serbian defeat has gained essentially unanimous assent among Serbs. For further
discussion, see Kampus 1989, pp. 3, 14.
3. The Memorandum was drafted by novelist Dobrica Ćosić and other members of
the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Art (see Banac 1992, pp. 1099-1101).

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SABRINA PETRA RAMET is Professor of International Studies at

the University of Washington.
ADDRESS: HMJ School of International Studies, Thomson Hall
DR-05, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.