The Shape of Populism. Serbia before the Dissolution of Yugoslavia

Marko Grdešić’s monograph is a political sociological study of the ever more ubiquitous phenomenon of populism through the prism of a curiously understudied episode—Serbia in the late 1980s. The central goal of this slim, meticulously written volume is to unpack the ways in which populism operated, with a focus not only on discursive elements but, perhaps more importantly, the modes of mobilisation in the short and long term.

Populism is conceived as a fractal phenomenon, ‘driven by a constant and persistent mode of elite–mass interaction […] in which elites are always inciting, amplifying, molding, and manipulating mass action’ (3). It is understood as an ‘interactive process in which both elites and masses participate, but in which the rules of the game are written by elites’ (3). The author concedes that ‘populism remains a dirty word for most’ but argues that it can be a productive concept and suggests reclaiming the word from its pejorative usage in order to coolly analyse the choices that populism entails (2). As well as going beyond the discursive, throughout the book Grdešić succeeds in ‘bringing the people back in’, challenging elite-centred and facile approaches that dismiss late-1980s Serbia as a case of top-down manipulation not requiring further exploration.

A short but comprehensive introduction to the Serbian case is provided (Chapter 2) to ensure the study is fully accessible to those who are not regional experts of Yugoslavia. The first empirical chapter (Chapter 3) focuses on the ‘hows’ of populist mobilisation, namely the interaction between contentious events and elite events (in this case, party sessions) and the toolkit of ‘eventful history’. Through combining statistics and qualitative analysis, Grdešić argues that it is possible to trace the interactions between elite and mass actors as a means to more effectively study populist mobilisation. Here he assesses whether key party sessions affected the protest wave and demonstrates that the 5 September 1988 party session was a key turning point in which elite intervention most influenced the scale of populist mobilisation.

The same party session also represents a watershed in Chapter 4, which examines the construction of the discursive category of ‘the people’ through the rubric of the Serbian newspaper Politika. While the published letters from ordinary people were certainly orchestrated by elites, Grdešić reminds that elite organisational assistance ‘does not mean that citizens participated against their will’ (88).

Chapter 5 moves to visual content—cartoons which juxtapose the people (most often represented by the industrial worker) and parasitic elites presented as armchair politicians. Here the stress is on the concept of ‘producerism’, compatible with dichotomous interpretations of society as was Serbia in the late 1980s (though as Grdešić underlines, it has an earlier lineage with the spectre of the bureaucracy being a long-standing trope in Yugoslavia and a producerist ethos built into the Marxist foundations of the system). Though not explicated, the study suggests that populism forms a means to bridge the conceptual gap between class and national identity in Serbia in the 1980s with the notion of producerism being particularly productive in this regard.

The final empirical chapter (Chapter 6), engages with the legacies of populism through contemporary focus group interviews with former participants of the 1988 ‘yoghurt revolution’ in Novi Sad. The author explores how individual participants now think about the populist episode they took part in some three decades ago and the extent to which they feel manipulated, guilty, resentful or proud. Grdešić rightly notes that research on populism is stronger on the ‘supply’ side of populism—the creation and content of populist discourse by its elite purveyors rather than its foot soldiers—and so this chapter serves as a useful corrective to this.

This sixth chapter goes furthest in bringing the individual ‘back in’ to the story while more broadly arriving at the claim that populist events sabotage ‘the emergence of an active political citizenry in the long-run’ (138). More engagement with the rather developed field of memory studies in the successor states of Yugoslavia could add finesse to the argument, and would perhaps taper the claim that the act of speaking about the past in an interview setting amounts to the much wider-reaching social process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (i. e. of coming to terms with the past in a specific way associated with Germany’s nazi past).

The study contributes to three fields— political sociology, the literature on populism, and Yugoslav area studies. In each of these, Grdešić succeeds in breaking new ground and advocates for a cross-fertilization between the field of social movements and the field of populism (for example by drawing on approaches to ‘eventful history’ and ‘collective identity’). The only complaint from this reviewer is the absence of gender as a category of analysis considering that the Anti-Bureaucratic Revolution was a highly gendered phenomenon. Wendy Bracewell for example, has detailed how an ‘embattled masculinity’ formed a key component of late 1980s Serbian nationalism and industrial unrest in contrast to feminised armchair politicians, key protagonists in the cartoons of Chapter 5 in this book. ^[1]

Nebojša Vladisavljević (incidentally also a specialist of the Antibureaucratic Revolution and social movements) has decried the failure of Yugoslav specialists in the field of political science to produce knowledge that ‘travels well’—scholarship that is also of relevance for understanding comparable phenomena elsewhere, accessible to comparativists and theoretically-oriented researchers. ^[2] By balancing detailed knowledge of the area with disciplinary rigour, Grdešić completely succeeds in deparochialising the Yugoslav/Serbian case of populism. While the study is certainly of great interest to Yugoslav-interested scholars (particularly those who seek correctives to elite-centred accounts of late socialism and the state’s demise), it is framed far more broadly and speaks to contemporary issues (indeed the book ambitiously begins and ends with discussions of figures like Trump, Farage, Corbyn and Sanders rather than Tito and Milošević). The study is undoubtedly of interest to political sociologists and scholars of populism and social movements, above all due to the productive ways in which Grdešić cracks open connections between these fields, demonstrates ways to borrow between the respective literatures to bring the state of the art forward, and further hone the ‘populist methodological toolkit’.