(Post)Yugoslav Humanitarianism
The Yugoslav Red Cross promoted a version of humanitarianism that served its geopolitical goals. After the fall of socialism, nonaligned humanitarianism vanished and was replaced by liberal humanitarianism, with real consequences on the ground in Montenegro and elsewhere.
With Čarna Brković (University of Mainz).
Listen: “(Post)Yugoslav Humanitarianism” (Episode #128)
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Transcript: “(Post)Yugoslav Humanitarianism” (Episode #128)
PETER KORCHNAK: This episode of Remembering Yugoslavia is brought to you by Yugoblok, a member-supported global community and resource hub for all who remember Yugoslavia. Through membership contributions, Yugoblok members make this podcast (and a whole lot more) accessible and freely available to all. Members can also listen to episodes ad-free and enjoy extended and bonus episodes.
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PETER KORCHNAK: This is Remembering Yugoslavia, a Yugoblok show exploring the memory of a country that no longer exists. I’m your host, Peter Korchnak.
In the stories of the Nonaligned Movement we’ve learned that Yugoslavia was providing humanitarian help to fellow nonaligned countries, particularly those fighting to shed colonial rule. Starting with the independence struggle in Algeria and on to Angola, Egypt, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Palestine, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, and many others, Yugoslavia supplemented diplomatic, financial, training, materiel, and military support with humanitarian aid to assist liberation movements and local populations in the time of need. Algeria and Vietnam received particularly consistent support, in their struggles against France and the US, respectively.
A number of entities were involved in the provision of this aid, both in Yugoslavia, as coordinators or fundraisers, and on the ground. The main organization performing the humanitarian work was Jugoslovenski Crveni krst, the Yugoslav Red Cross, later the Red Cross of Yugoslavia.
Established in 1921, it was dismantled along with Yugoslavia in World War II. The People’s Committee for the Liberation of Yugoslavia, the wartime revolutionary government, revived it in 1944 and it was formally legally re-established in 1946. “Throughout the socialist period, the Red Cross played a significant role in social and health-related activities. It provided health education [like first aid courses], the fight against tuberculosis, voluntary blood donation, anti-alcohol campaigns, and providing aid during natural disasters,” writes Pavle Antonijević in a journal article.
With the evolution of workers’ self-management, the Red Cross too transitioned into a self-managing organization, particularly in the 1960s. Its 1972 statute defined it as “a voluntary humanitarian, mass, and self-management social organization of citizens in the SFRY, operating within the realms of health…and education.”
Its administrative organization mirrored that of the country itself, with a Yugoslav umbrella above republican, provincial, district, municipal as well as local community and workplace chapters.
Soon, Antonijević continues, the Yugoslav Red Cross expanded its mission “beyond its traditional humanitarian role, emerging as a key institution in fostering the consciousness of the socialist man.”
Already its 1963 statute declared that, “The Yugoslav Red Cross participates in the formation and progression of new social relations, rooted in the principles of socialist humanism and solidarity, particularly through its educational efforts aimed at youth.”
The 1972 statute reinforced these ideological roots. One of the organization’s primary goals was, “deepening and strengthening the brotherhood and unity of the people and nationalities of Yugoslavia, and fostering social relations grounded in socialist humanism and solidarity.”
These ideas, continues Antonijević, were quote, “conceptually envisioned as a system in which poverty is systematically eliminated, and society collectively attends to all members through principles of mutual aid and cooperation.”
These concepts of course came from the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, which in its 1958 program declared: “The transformation of fundamental institutions—factories, cooperatives, communes, schools, and social organizations, centers on cultivating openness, trust, benevolence, understanding, tolerance, cooperative synergy, and assistance. In short, it emphasizes human sympathies and camaraderie among individuals.” End quote.
The Yugoslav Red Cross was more than just a humanitarian organization, helping those in need, but rather quote, “it aimed to meet the collective, communal needs of all citizens in order to promote a socialist understanding of well-being.”
ČARNA BRKOVIĆ: The Red Cross Yugoslavia was a very government adjacent actor. So there was somehow a close alignment between socialist principles and humanitarian principles, in their view.
PETER KORCHNAK: Čarna Brković is an ethnologist and anthropologist from Montenegro at the University of Mainz. She is the author of Realigning Humanitarianism in the Balkans: From Cold War Politics to Neoliberal Ethics, out now from the Indiana University Press.
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Yugoslavia’s humanitarianism extended beyond its borders, particularly in the context of the Nonaligned Movement.
But before we get to that story, let’s anchor ourselves in some definitions and history.
First, humanitarianism.
ČARNA BRKOVIĆ: Humanitarianism is a framework of providing support to people in need. And this framework is premised on this assumption that everyone deserves support simply by virtue of being human. So who we are as people, our gender, race, class, age, citizenship, whatever you want, all of this is irrelevant. We [INAUDIBLE] help simply because we are human beings.
And interestingly, humanitarianism developed with the rise of capitalism as a form of helping people who lived on the other side of the world. So colonial capitalist expansion connected people across the world economically into particular kinds of networks, among other things, networks of exploitation. So someone worked on a plantation in India, for example, and in doing so, they generated wealth for someone who lived in Britain.
And the rise of humanitarian imagination in this period followed this colonial capitalist expansion and some of the first efforts that scholars today describe as humanitarian were related to the abolition of slavery in the 18th century. And the rise of this humanitarian imagination in this moment meant that a sense of connection was developed with someone who is suffering on the other side of the world. So there was a sense of responsibility for their suffering and a belief that one could do something to ease that suffering.
PETER KORCHNAK: From that point, many different forms of humanitarianism developed, all of which operate on their own particular premises and do various things in different ways.
ČARNA BRKOVIĆ: The period after the Second World War was something that the historian Silvia Salvatici calls the great laboratory for humanitarianism. So the architecture of the international arena was still being developed in the first years and decades after the Second World War, and socialist countries had been active in shaping international relations and humanitarian arenas. So Western countries started building these arenas already in 1945 but the Communist East also became quite active in this domain in [the] 1950s, 1955, 1956, and so on.
And in this period, there were heated debates among various kinds of actors, intellectuals, politicians, academics and so on, diplomats from different countries, nonaligned countries, socialist countries, Western countries, and so on, about what humanitarianism is and what it should be.
Some of the Cold War division and competition between the United States and the Soviet Union played out through humanitarianism as well, through global developmental aid humanitarian interventions in what was then understood as a Third World, the so-called Third World, and Yugoslavia was somehow part of this competition, let’s say, tried to play a role in this.
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PETER KORCHNAK: As you may recall from the nonalignment series, the 1950 UN General Assembly session was something of a coming out for Yugoslavia as a newly assertive global actor, presaging its founding of the Nonaligned Movement a decade later.
Likewise in the field of humanitarianism.
ČARNA BRKOVIĆ: So, for example, in the 1950 Yugoslav representatives proposed including a clause in the statute of the UNHCR, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. And this clause stipulates that the work of the High Commissioner shall be humanitarian and social.
And this proposal ended up being paragraph two of the UNHCR statute. And this proposal was motivated by the ongoing discussion between the communist East and the capitalist West about the repatriation, resettlement of political refugees. So communist countries supported this clause, the human humanitarian and nonpolitical clause, because maybe funnily, they did not want Western countries to politicize the repatriation and resettlement of political refugees. They didn’t want them to score points, so to say, and they wanted humanitarian work to be non-political and humanitarian.
PETER KORCHNAK: For the Yugoslavs, the Red Cross fit into this reality quite well.
ČARNA BRKOVIĆ: Yugoslav authorities saw the Red Cross, because of its very particular global structure, as an excellent stage on which to try to gain more influence and to gain more visibility for the nonaligned countries and the Nonaligned Movement.
The Red Cross is structured in a very particular way: there are two main organizations in Geneva, the ICRC and then the League, today the Federation, of National Red Cross, Red Crescent societies. The ICRC is International Committee of the Red Cross. And then there are national societies. Back then in the 1970s there were, I think, 120, today there are around 200.
So the Red Cross has this, internationally has this structure as almost as a family of nations with a certain center. And this provided Yugoslavia with this really, really convenient stage at which to to put forward some, some of their thoughts about how to connect the world, how to somehow do politics and non-politics, and so on.
PETER KORCHNAK: In her ethnographic work, Brković came across some interesting Yugoslav-era archival materials.
ČARNA BRKOVIĆ: What the story that these documents were telling was somehow at that moment unclear to me. They looked uncanny, let’s say, so they both looked very, very familiar and somehow really strange, almost otherworldly strange, and I didn’t quite know how to make sense of them.
Because the documents that I saw spoke about the first Red Cross Peace Conference that was organized in 1975 in Belgrade, in Yugoslavia. And during this conference, the Red Cross of Yugoslavia brought humanitarians from 80 countries to Belgrade in an effort to convince the International Red Cross movement to reconsider some of its foundational humanitarian principles.
PETER KORCHNAK: Basically, the Yugoslavs wanted to redefine humanitarianism overall and within that, racism. More on this shortly.
ČARNA BRKOVIĆ: And these documents also contained photographs that portrayed people from Africa, from Asia, and from Yugoslavia, planting a tree in Cetinje, for example, surrounded by socialist buildings, and photographs of them visiting schools factories and simply having fun.
And I think the sense of the uncanny, when I think about it now, was created by the fact that these were everyday spaces these photographs portrayed, so spaces that looked almost stereotypically socialist. And at the same time, they provided a stage for this transnational encounter of humanitarian, socialist humanitarians, humanitarians from the Global South, which got forgotten over time.
PETER KORCHNAK: In the 1970s, the Yugoslav Red Cross set out to push a number of reforms, reflecting an alternative vision for the world for humanitarianism.
Brković writes, “the Yugoslav Red Cross…tried to intervene in the international Red Cross movement in ways that reflected the positions and interests of the [nonaligned] countries, advocating a particular mode of humanitarian intervention that interwove socialist and national liberation into the vocabularies and imaginaries of humanitarianism.”
ČARNA BRKOVIĆ: On the one hand, they proposed alternative understandings of the key humanitarian principles.
So the Red Cross movement has seven fundamental principles. Neutrality is one of them. And Yugoslav humanitarians thought that neutrality was impossible, old-fashioned, it should be abandoned as a humanitarian principle. But instead of neutrality, the Red Cross should strive to be apolitical, they suggested. And they developed a particular understanding of what this ‘being apolitical’ or nonpolitical meant.
And I should note that this critique of neutrality resonates with what, at the same time, another humanitarian organization in the West also directed to the Red Cross. Doctors Without Borders emerged out of the Red Cross at about the same time precisely because some of the former members of the Red Cross movement disagreed with the Red Cross approach of silent diplomacy which was then somehow very prominent in the Red Cross activities. And this approach means that as a humanitarian, you rarely ever speak out about the things that you witness in order to not jeopardize your access to those in need. Doctors Without Borders did not criticize neutrality necessarily, but they did criticize the Red Cross because of this silent diplomacy approach, and they thought that neutrality involves this duty to bear witness.
So there are some really interesting, important resonances between different humanitarian organizations working at that time.
PETER KORCHNAK: Another idea the Yugoslavs promoted was an alternative definition of peace.
ČARNA BRKOVIĆ: It’s not an absence of violence, but a dynamic process of cooperation between people, they said, and they wrote, that there is a distinction I’m reading now, citing “between a piece of the conquerors and aggressors, keeping under heel other people since subjugation until their eyes unraveled on the one hand, and the peace founded upon certain principles, justice, equality, equity and the right to self determination on the on the other hand.”
And they also tried to intervene into the human international humanitarian law. Like various other actors who worked at that time, they saw Yugoslav Partisans’ fight, but also fight of the liberation movements, not as civil wars, which were fought between more or less equal sides, but instead as instances of fighting against occupation and external aggression.
PETER KORCHNAK: Another issue the Yugoslavs tackled was racism.
ČARNA BRKOVIĆ: It suggested that racism is a humanitarian problem, and some something that national Red Cross societies in countries that had laws, which relied on race as a category, should somehow deal with.
It established a Center for the Training of the Red Cross Staff from the Nonaligned Countries and Liberation Movements. It sent humanitarian aid to its partners from the Nonaligned Movement, it organized this first Red Cross conference on peace, and so on.
PETER KORCHNAK: And finally, the Yugoslav Red Cross strived to implement these ideas on the ground.
ČARNA BRKOVIĆ: They also, in parallel, worked on developing alternative networks of circulation of humanitarian aid. So for example, they sent a hospital, they sent money to build a hospital in Peru. They would be sending blood donations to India and so on.
PETER KORCHNAK: In all this, again, as we’ve learned in our series on nonalignment, Yugoslavia punched above its weight. The outlook was based on two ideas.
First, Yugocentrism. “The Yugocentric vision of the Red Cross was premised upon…an awareness of one’s own marginal position in global affairs,” writes Brković in her book, “and an attempt to improve [this] position and that of [its] allies by building a different world.” In other words, the Yugoslavs knew their position in the field and attempted to change it by changing the field itself. It was particularly that last piece, developing alternative humanitarian aid networks, that served as the principal tool in this work.
“The Yugoslav Red Cross attempted to build a different world by creating various new routes of circulation of money, donor blood, and medical aid toward its non-aligned partners…objects that carried with them specific forms of moral imagination and affect. This was a historically particular attempt to bring about social transformation by reorganizing global routes of circulation,” concludes Brković.
ČARNA BRKOVIĆ: What we can follow here is somehow a sense of entitlement that they had the right to participate in this international discussion over what humanitarianism is and what it should be. And at that moment, this was somehow not just something— this sense of entitlement was shared and it existed, I think, in many, many corners of the world where we can’t find it anymore, necessarily. So not just in Yugoslavia.
PETER KORCHNAK: Now lest we fall into a nostalgia trap, let’s take a look at how this lofty stuff worked in practice.
As you heard in the episodes on nonalignment, Yugoslavia ran into structural problems when working to put its declared goals and policies into practice. The first of those was of course money. There simply wasn’t enough funding to pay for everything Yugoslavia wanted to do, and so it didn’t do everything or did not always do what it did completely.
Some of the funding issues stemmed from how this humanitarian work was actually funded. In addition to government, the Red Cross relied on individual donations from Yugoslav citizens. So Yugoslavs were asked, during various campaigns, Solidarity Weeks, etcetera, to donate money, blood, clothes, whatever, depending on the need. But in a socialist state, for things that weren’t mandated, the Red Cross had to rely on the people’s sense of moral responsibility. Which they had to develop first.
“The Red Cross humanitarians believed that…success …was dialectically dependent on the process of changing the consciousness of the Yugoslavs, which meant internalizing socialist ideology as well as its international aspirations,” writes Brković. “Similarly to other state socialist countries in Eastern Europe who developed a ‘consciousness-driven model of social transformation,’ the way to bring the socialist consciousness into being was through training, propaganda, and the expansion of existing infrastructures in new directions.” In that last piece, “the key strategy the Yugoslavs used…was to use the gifts that had already circulated internally within their country [like blood or medicine] and send them off in new directions.” End quote.
Even what the Red Cross did manage to do presented specific challenges. Donating blood or building health centers in the Third World was good and great but, writes Brković, “there was almost no preexisting infrastructure connecting aid actors in the East and in the South.” So the provision of humanitarian aid was difficult and often inefficient.
Moreover—
ČARNA BRKOVIĆ: The Red Cross of Yugoslavia tried to offer this alternative to the Western humanitarianism. But this, this world making project, has to be approached critically for several reasons.
First, it was deeply embedded in this idea of the national order of things. So they did not just try to help fellow humans on the other side of the world, but fellow nations in need. A lot of their imagination of what humanitarianism is and could be and so on was informed by the repertoire of the European nation state.
And many of these principles and attempts to intervene and change things were directed outwards. When we take a look inwards at what was happening in Yugoslavia at the same time, the situation looks very, very different.
Yugoslav humanitarianism was a deeply racializing project. I did not talk about how the Red Cross of Yugoslavia treated people in Yugoslavia, so people in Kosovo, for example, or Muslims and so on, so people who were seen as backward because they did not embody these socialist ideals.
PEGER KORCHNAK: “For the Yugoslav Red Cross, humanitarianism had to involve anti-racist struggles against colonizers and apartheid if it involved a genuine concern for one’s fellow humans,” writes Brković. “Yet this commitment to anti-racism in the international space went hand in hand with examples of racialization in everyday life. The Yugoslav Red Cross engaged in…legalistic anti-racism, an ambivalent practice of advocating anti-racism in international arenas while disregarding processes of racialization that take place in everyday life.”
ČARNA BRKOVIĆ: Once we take a look at what happened in practice, like in everyday life, with an implementation of some of these alternative principles and ideas and so on, we find serious problems with this project.
Many of these initiatives that I’ve mentioned or described are part of this broader Yugoslav attempt to establish new networks of circulation of moral sentiments, of humanitarian aid globally.
But for example, one such initiative was this Red Cross Center for the Education of Staff Cadres, they said, from Developing and Nonaligned Countries and Liberation Movements. However, people who would come to Belgrade to this Center to learn how to either establish a Red Cross, Red Crescent chapter through their country, or how to strengthen the existing one would first be medically examined upon entering the country, because the assumption was that they came from tropical areas, they might not be aware of what they are sick with, and so on. So there is this moment where you invite people from Africa and Asia to come to Belgrade to educate them about humanitarianism, how to organize a humanitarian organization, and so on, and then you first medically examine them for tropical diseases.
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ČARNA BRKOVIĆ: With the fall of socialism, various challenges that were made to the humanitarian project from these multiple sides vanished, and they somehow transformed the humanitarianism as a moral, political, and economic project also.
PETER KORCHNAK: “In this unipolar world, after the end of history, Western European reading of universals such as humanitarianism suddenly seemed without an alternative,” writes Brković. “Socialist countries had been active in shaping international relations and humanitarian arenas. Their fall meant that various challenges to the humanitarian project also vanished, which profoundly transformed it.”
ČARNA BRKOVIĆ: Historian Michael Barnett described this as a shift from neo-humanitarianism, which was influenced by the Cold War and decolonization, to liberal humanitarianism. Philosopher Robert Meister theorizes this shift as a move from politics to ethics, and he suggested the pre-1989 conception of human rights was revolutionary: it was politically centered on the struggles for equality and liberty, while the post-Cold War discourse of human rights had been centered on the primacy of the ethical.
PETER KORCHNAK: “The fall of socialism muted multipolar discussions about alternative visions and principles of humanitarianism and reinforced an ethics of professional humanitarianism,” writes Brković.
I see a paradox here. In humanitarianism, as in so many other arenas, the demise of totalitarianism, which held the only truth is that which is espoused by the communist party, meant a transition to a system that held there’s only one truth and one way, our way, which is different and better, but still, there are no alternatives. The end of history also meant the end of discussion.
The transition from socialism brought about a major realignment.
ČARNA BRKOVIĆ: This happened in former Yugoslavia and Montenegro, but it happened also, I think, more broadly in some sense. And Montenegro also got realigned from a country that could be described as the so-called Second World country, or a nonaligned country, became part of the European periphery.
PETER KORCHNAK: Likewise in humanitarianism. The realignment quote “entailed moving away from the humanitarian imaginaries that emerged during the Nonaligned Movement and embracing the imaginary associated with the liberal humanitarian tradition. This involved re-imagining the kind of world that was worth creating and each person’s role in it.”
Montenegro was in a special position after the fall of socialism.
ČARNA BRKOVIĆ: Around 4 million people were displaced during the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s. And Montenegro is a small country, it has 650,000 inhabitants, and it provided refuge to over 160,000 displaced people in that decade.
PETER KORCHNAK: In other words, the number of refugees in the country equaled a third of its population.
ČARNA BRKOVIĆ: Some of those camps existed for many, many years. Some existed for like, 10 or 15 years. And people who lived in these camps did not always have a clear legal status. So even if they wanted to, they could not leave those camps.
So for a combination of reasons, legally speaking, people who lived in these refugee camps were not refugees, legally speaking, but they were also not citizens and they were not residents, they had this ambivalent legal status. And in some sense, these people lived parallel to the Montenegrin state, rather than in it.
PETER KORCHNAK: In one sense, they were citizens of the same country, Yugoslavia, so not refugees, but in another, they were also not from Montenegro, so they were not Montenegrins. Citizenship cracks the dissolution of Yugoslavia opened were deep here.
Brković worked at one such refugee camp, which housed Roma, Ashkali, and Balkan Egyptians who had fled from Kosovo.
Meanwhile, the Konik refugee camp outside Podgorica, also mostly for people from Kosovo, was the largest refugee camp in the Balkans. In 2012, the Open Society Foundations called it “Europe’s shame.”
The Red Cross of Montenegro managed the Konik camp as UNHCR’s local partner for most of its existence.
Konik finally shuttered in 2018, when the last remaining residents were relocated to social housing.
ČARNA BRKOVIĆ: We can see in these refugee camps that I studied liberal humanitarianism on the ground as well as in the ideology. And liberal humanitarianism is a very messy constellation. It is a mixture of humanitarian aid, international development, post-conflict reconstruction, but it’s also about peace-building and democracy building, state-building, human rights protections, and so on.
And when humanitarians tried to implement this, or when they pursued this liberal humanitarianism in European periphery, or let’s say, in a semi-periphery of capitalism, this liberal humanitarianism took on a very specific shape.
Local humanitarians who ended up running these refugee camps—so these would be Montenegrin citizens who were running and managing these refugee camps—they first attended workshops and training programs that were organized by fellow humanitarians from various Western European countries, and they learned what was expected of them in order to provide humanitarian aid and to manage refugee camps in a professional manner.
However, despite all of the training and knowledge that they received, refugee camps still looked very different on the ground in Montenegro than they did in Germany or in Denmark or in Sweden, asylum centers and so on.
PETER KORCHNAK: Why?
ČARNA BRKOVIĆ: There were structural reasons for that. So it wasn’t the lack of knowledge, it wasn’t the lack of trying, and one of the main structural reasons that made this humanitarian mandate, this idea of professional liberal humanitarianism almost impossible to fulfill, was related to this legal and political status of the displaced.
State institutions provided support, but they were somehow partially involved in these humanitarian efforts. They were occasionally very indifferent to displaced people who lived in the refugee camps.
PETER KORCHNAK: Members and staff of local humanitarian organizations provided relief, assistance, and services to people living in the camps, from food to health care to education, with encouragement, if not mandate and some funding from the international community but without state support. So basically, do as we say but you’re pretty much on your own to figure out how to do it logistically.
ČARNA BRKOVIĆ: They somehow left the humanitarians to do what they did and both the humanitarians and the state somehow lived separately. They had this contract of mutual indifference. And this means that the Montenegrin state largely left it up to the humanitarians to finance the survival of displaced people in these refugee camps. It effectively outsourced responsibility for them to the international community.
PETER KORCHNAK: Again, why?
ČARNA BRKOVIĆ: There was a particular political economic logic, I think, in the background, which was incredibly cruel. So outsourcing care for displaced to the humanitarians kept these displaced people away from the labor markets, both formal and informal, white, gray, and black markets, which were already overpopulated by impoverished Montenegrin citizens.
For example, local humanitarians provided training for the residents of these refugee camps, adult residents of these refugee camps, for various kinds of manual jobs, such as wall painting and locksmithing or weaving, and so on. And in the first few years of working in these camps, they were hopeful. So they thought, if we teach the displaced how to do this craft, if they behave decently, they do the job well, then this knowledge will turn out to be useful. After some point, they will be able to use this knowledge to earn money.
And over time, this hopeful stance became mixed up, let’s say, with irony. So the job training turned out to be largely worthless, in some sense, because the displaced people could not get legal employment due to their ambivalent legal status.
So local humanitarians still kept organizing these job trainings and they issued the displaced with certificates confirming they have successfully completed these trainings, although at one point it got clear that they wouldn’t be able to use these certificates to find legal employment. And one of them said, “We issue these as-if diplomas.”
PETER KORCHNAK: The parallel suggests itself with the jokey socialist motto, “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.”
ČARNA BRKOVIĆ: So there was this dissonance between the invitation to behave as if you belong to a particular framework, to a certain structure that makes certain things, kinds of actions possible, and the everyday infrastructure that did not support such a sense.
And this disconnect, this dissonance created this position of suspended agency. And suspended agency is what happens when you’re invited to join a certain project, such as humanitarianism, while the structural conditions prevent you from actually doing so.
PETER KORCHNAK: Another change that occurred with the repositioning of Montenegro from the Yugocentric to peripheral position, writes Brković, was “the loss of a sense of entitlement to articulate alternatives from the edges. It is precisely the will to take part in global conversations as an equal participant—as a producer of knowledge—that has been lost with the transformation of this region from non-alignment into a European periphery.”
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PETER KORCHNAK: There were, however, some similarities between the Yugoslav slash socialist and Montenegrin slash capitalist, or liberal humanitarianism.
First, both aimed to change people’s consciousness. In the Yugoslav case, this was the consciousness of Yugoslavs to motivate them to assist. In the Montengrin case, the target was the consciousness of people receiving the assistance.
Brković writes: “[H]umanitarianism in capitalist semiperiphery meant behaving like a professional who works hard on transforming people’s mentalities. Local humanitarians tried to help the displaced change themselves in order to live better. One major informal goal…was to help the displaced change their mentality. This meant helping them develop a different view of themselves and others, gender relationships, bodily autonomy, and so on by educating camp residents to use contraception, give birth in hospitals, avoid teenage marriages and pregnancies, follow administrative procedures, show up on time, and so forth.” End quote.
Indeed, this idea had socialist origins. But, Brković writes, “[i]f class “consciousness” was to be changed by building new and expanding the existing infrastructures during the socialist Yugoslav era, in postsocialism, the “mentality” was to be changed solely through individual efforts.” Of course, albeit without providing or even attempting to provide the infrastructure to support this effort.
Another similarity was the approach to humans. Socialist humanitarians aimed to help people who needed it wherever they lived. Montenegrin humanitarians, Brković writes, “translated liberal humanitarian tradition into a project of crossing social boundaries. Local Red Cross and other aid workers understood humanitarianism as caring for fellow humans, regardless of their race, ethnonationality, legal status, class, age, gender, or any other individual trait. [They] were determined to “see the human within” [and] strived to recognize shared humanity beneath layers of particular sociocultural identities.”
Realigning Humanitarianism in the Balkans: From Cold War Politics to Neoliberal Ethics is out now from Indiana University Press. Use the code US2530 for 30 percent off at IUPress.org.
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PETER KORCHNAK: That’s all for this episode of Remembering Yugoslavia, thank you for listening—and helping people.
All guests’ opinions expressed are solely their own; unless otherwise noted they do not express, reflect, or represent the views or opinions of any third party, including myself.
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Outro music courtesy of Robert Petrić. Interludes courtesy of Sticky Keys.
I am Peter Korchňak.
Ćao!