Postsocialism, borders, security and race after Yugoslavia

Abstract

the contradictory racialised imaginaries of the Yugoslav region’s ‘cultural archive’ (Chapter 1) and the shifting nature of translations of race into discourses of ethnic and national belonging (Chapter 2). Though many past applications of postcolonial thought to south-east Europe have bracketed race away, identifications with racialised narratives of Europeanness predated state socialism, yet alone the collapse of Yugoslavia which, it is sometimes thought, opened space for new postsocialist racisms. Translations of broader racialised discourses in the 1990s indeed took distinctive forms, embedded in a transnational European ‘cultural racism’ (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991: 26) consolidating nationalisms around a common defensive project of securing Europe against supposedly culturally alien, unassimilable migrant Others from Africa and Asia (Lentin 2004; Fekete 2009). Culturalist narratives of Europeannessas-modernity and Europeanness-at-risk entered traditionalist– conservative and liberal national identity discourses most evidently in Slovenia (Mihelj 2005; Petrović 2009; Longinović 2011), but also elsewhere. Identity narratives at the north-west end of ‘nesting orientalisms’ (Bakić-Hayden 1995) trained racialising lenses south-east across the Balkans towards Muslim and dark-skinned refugees and migrants entering Europe. Slovenian and Croatian nationalism’s performative rejection of Yugoslav state socialism and Yugoslav multi-ethnicity appeared to have also swept Yugoslav anti-colonial solidarities away. While post-Yugoslav identifications with cultural racism went back too far simply to be ‘consequences’ of postsocialism, the region’s violently 4