Die Legitimation staatlicher Eingriffe in die Soziale Marktwirtschaft (German Edition)

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My scholarship 2, forints per month, plus free accommodation enabled me to live well. I was well aware of the ironies in being able to revel in one of Central Europe s finest bourgeois cities, while enjoying socialist subsidies in every domain, from concert tickets to the recently completed metro line. Certainly I could enjoy a higher standard of living than I had enjoyed as a student in the UK.

Strong espresso coffee at two forints or less for a dupla, and a sweet fizzy grape juice called Traubisoda were among the first tangible delights for my taste buds. I also recall the brilliant posters advertising a product called Fabulon, a product I never bought, indeed I still do not know what it was; but the model on the poster was simply ravishing. I was of course aware that many aspects of life were far from paradisiacal.

Right from the beginning, my friends included persons highly unsympathetic to the socialist state. Yet I heard rather little criticism of the government leaders and their policies. By this time it seemed that most Hungarians saw no point in dreaming about a political upheaval, but had turned instead in profiting from the new economic opportunities opening up in all fields. A comparison with post China is instructive.

I made some effort to move in very different social circles during that first year, which was primarily devoted to learning the language 6. I was able to maintain some of these contacts during the following year while living in the countryside, and to renew them in , when I returned to Budapest to work for a year as a language editor at the New Hungarian Quarterly since plain Hungarian Quarterly.

I visited the Academy of Sciences and the universities on a regular basis; but my social time was by no means taken up entirely with intellectual company, and I had virtually no contacts to the capital s small group of self-proclaimed dissidents. S o, what did I do in that first year? Given that my number one priority was to learn Hungarian, the obvious policy was to avoid places where communication was always likely to switch into English or some other Western language.

Sport was a key element in this strategy for me. I should make it clear that my sporting prowess has never been better than mediocre. In my colleges in Oxford and Cambridge I had played soccer on lush English grass, and outside the football seasons I kept reasonably fit by running. I had no plans to engage in any organized sport in Hungary. I think I had the usual preconceptions about how Eastern Bloc states manipulated and exploited their sporting stars stereotypes which have been partially confirmed since the demise of socialism, e.

Football and running became two of the chief elements in my everyday life in Budapest swimming was a third; my abilities are even more limited here and I shall not mention it further; besides, any tourist can visit the city s thermal baths and observe their significance for the local population. I found my football team thanks to a secretary at the Anthropological Institute of the Academy of Sciences.

Its composition was diverse: The son of a well-known and politically controversial poet seemed to show little interest himself in pursuing an intellectual s career and always wanted me to bring him the latest Frank Zappa record when returning from the West. Some were Jewish, but that was never a subject of conversation. Nonetheless, the political issues of the day had little impact. My friends distanced themselves from their state in a different way from the new cohorts of socialist entrepreneurs: I would say that they despised it on moral grounds and they believed Western states to be superior in this respect an idealistic view which I occasionally dared to question.

Above all, we had common interests in popular music and in sport. The latter was soccer played on cinders in a cage only a little larger than a tennis court it was really a quite different sport from what I had played in England. The games were short and fast. We were rather average and my performances in mid-field were somewhere below the average, but the team spirit was marvellous. The strength of the ties they had to each other was something I envied I have never come across a secondary school cohort in Britain which held together in this way. Of course my participation was initially limited due to my limited language skills.

I certainly missed much of the humour. Moreover I did not have to worry about military service as they did, and everyone knew that my life trajectory would take me elsewhere. Yet these kids made the foreign kid feel at home and their kindness and consideration were often overwhelming. The main thing for me was that, almost from the beginning, I could be confident that they were not performing for the benefit of the foreigner a constant problem in the work of Wedel.

But many conversations and the parties I attended unfolded just as they would have in my absence, and I had no influence on lively discussions and the playing out of differences of opinion within the group. Over the years I have lost touch with all but one member. My memories have also fragmented. The fastest winger in the team had a distant relation in Belgium: I remember his sadness, after returning from his first visit to a Western country: I believe he went on to become a successful banker.

Our most effective striker over-stayed in Britain by a full year after his passport was confiscated by the Hungarian consulate. Friends felt sure that he would face few reprisals for this misdemeanour when he returned to Hungary, since his parents were communists of long standing, but in fact the recriminations were considerable. F ootball, then, was very important in my early experiences of everyday life under socialism. Neither our Sunday kickabouts on Margaret Island nor our local league could qualify as clubs or formal associations in the sense of contemporary civil society theorists.

Whereas this community might be described as a niche, fully separate from the institutions of the socialist state, my second sporting life differed insofar as it unfolded within the framework of a socialist institution and state policies to widen participation. By following Lumumba Street I could reach an athletics complex where the gates were always open and a metre track was at my disposal. My first visits passed without any communication. One day I was addressed by another runner, who quickly overcame his surprise on finding that I was a foreigner and barely able to talk to him.

He told me that I was welcome and encouraged me to come along to regular training sessions. He was a local boy who had not studied beyond grade school. He was a long-distance runner who specialised in orienteering, and both he and his wife were unpaid coaches for the Sports Association of the Postal Workers Trades Union, to whom this sports complex belonged. Politics was even more completely off the agenda here. At this time Hungary had in Sarolta Monspart one of the leading international stars in this sport.

Her magnetism was one of the reasons for the popularity of the sport in the s I believe she later made a successful career in television. He died tragically in of a heart attack. She competes internationally in the veteran category, and her values have not changed at all over the years: Unfortunately she has found that it has become progressively harder to sustain these ideals in the postsocialist years.

The foreign anthropologist is not alone in looking back on this aspect of socialism with nostalgia. Many Hungarian groups were established in the later s; while some were more or less clearly modelled on an internationally celebrated Western band the s group Mini were, to my mind, musically every bit as impressive as Britain s Jethro Tull , others developed their own distinctive style.

It was not easy to buy Western music and these records were very expensive; but selected artists were distributed, e. I still possess an album of the greatest hits of Jimi Hendrix, imported to Hungary from India. Informal connections were extremely important in this sector: Sometimes even locally produced records sold out very quickly, so that even in market-oriented Hungary it was essential to have good contacts in order to obtain the goods.

The s was a golden age for popular music in Hungary. Many young people identified passionately with their favourite singers or band. There was also tremendous interest among young people in the subcultures of the West. They bought records of folk music, especially music from the Magyar minority in Transylvania, and participated in the city s emerging Dancehouse movement see Striker ; Taylor I tried not to disappoint my friends and pretended that I, too, could appreciate the emotional depth of the lyrics, but in fact of course my understanding of the poems was highly restricted.

Sometimes cosmopolitan pop and the growing vogue for celebrating Hungarian culture came together in intriguing ways. Fortunately for the foreign student, the texts were printed on the sleeve. If I were a flag I would never fly, I would get angry With every breath of wind. I would only be happy If they stiffened me, So I wouldn t be the plaything Of every breath of wind.

Many people knew the song, of course, but such controversial incidents were unusual and the fuss soon died down. These musicians were able to continue making music unimpeded, and the music was good; few of their lyrics could possibly be given a political interpretation. Like the old days, we have a train ticket to Cracow. We drink frothy Czech beer in the buffet car, Your GDR earrings are dazzling, Let s exchange 65 zloty for Czechoslovak crowns The flame of my Austrian lighter flares up we re going to Cracow! I see the glow at the end of your Plovdiv cigarette. Lean over across the table, let me see your ring, The gleaning stone that I bought you the year before last in Dubrovnik; Ah, we had some good times!

On the other hand he was inviting the listener to empathize with intensely felt, precious memories. No doubt different listeners received a different message. Did such works have had a safety-vent function in the society? Later, in the s, punk and other new elements also made their appearance in Hungary. In comparison to neighbouring countries, the popular music scene remained exceptionally lively and creative down to the end of socialism. It seems to me that the radicalism that was tolerated in this domain was perhaps fully as important as the expansion of economic freedoms in hindering the emergence of significant political radicalism.

The memory tracks I have followed in this paper have taken me back to everyday life under socialism in two recreational spheres, both of which were important for many urban citizens, music and sport. The latter tends to be associated with elite competition and socialist regimes have deservedly acquired a negative reputation in this regard. In Western perceptions, everyday life under socialism tends to be associated with problems of economic shortage, not to mention political snooping.

Hungary in the s was by no means entirely free of problems, though the common stereotype of this state in this period tends, with good reason, to emphasize rampant accumulation in the framework of the reformed socialist economy. In this paper, however, I have drawn attention to niches in which young people were able to relax and develop their own personalities, relatively free of the worries of material accumulation and of political pressures.

This was the closest I ever came to throwing off my foreigner s identity and realising the anthropologist s dream of going native. I suggest that these anecdotes and personal recollections of an outsider give insights which cast doubt on standard thinking about state and nation in the academic literature, both inside and outside Hungary. Notions that the socialist state was totalitarian are still widespread: Millions of citizens were able to get on with their lives without needing to take the kind of precautions that were needed by this time in the case of the GDR, with its bloated system of informants.

Hungarians had much more scope for embourgeoisement and for keeping the state at a distance. Indeed the niches were so vast that I am inclined to see the diehard agents of the regime as occupying the real niche repressive islands in a sea of great cultural as well as economic creativity. The misapprehensions concerning nation are perhaps less obvious, but here too the perceptions of the non-native may be a useful corrective.

I think this is a myth: I have mentioned the Dancehouse movement and the music associated with it. This was encouraged by the authorities and linked, often explicitly, to the cause of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania. National emotions also came through strongly in the realm of sport. Even though Hungary was no longer a major force in the most important sport, namely football, there was pride in the success of athletes in fields as diverse as gymnastics, javelin throwing and water polo.

In short, it seems to me that the seeds of the sentiments that proliferated in the public sphere of the s were definitely sown under socialism. Towards the end they were already strongly present in the public sphere, e. Even those who did not identify closely with this celebration of the nation were, I think, inevitably pressed by the quality of cultural products in this period into a heightened awareness of their Magyar identity.

This was the most fundamental asymmetry between me and all those I encountered. They knew all about the music that had meant something to me, with my British background. Indeed they often knew the Western artists better than I did. But I knew nothing of the Hungarian artists and of what riches there were to be discovered in every domain.

References Brownell, Susan Training the Body for China. Sports in the moral order of the People s Republic. The politics of anthropology in Eastern Europe. Tavistock, Hann, Chris Socialism and King Stephen s right hand. Religion in Communist Lands, 18 1: Romanian villagers to the revolution and beyond. National Integration through Socialist Planning. An anthropological study of a Romanian new town. The Dancehouse Folklorism in Hungary in the s. Institute of Culture; Leiden: Department of Anthropology, Taylor, Mary Fulbright Student Conference Papers.

Three centuries of political, economic and ethnic change. The University of California Press. Poland during and after communism. In later work she has probed the functioning of informal mechanisms in more academic analyses , ; but her more personal account of remains a good read. In I returned to take part in a Summer University in Economics, organized by the Karl Marx University of Economics; I extended my stay privately for some weeks and made my first visits to the countryside. I was told when I arrived that the sociologist Bill Lomax had apparently spent most of his time enjoying the capital s wine-bars.

I think both British and Hungarian sides were taken by surprise when Lomax published the results of his painstaking researches into the role of the Worker Councils in the revolution Lomax Yet I met very few postal workers in the years I ran with these friends; their social backgrounds were extremely diverse. He was soon able to find another suitable job, but this incident troubled me greatly indeed it still does trouble me. But I am nonetheless reluctant to draw far-reaching conclusions about the nature of the Hungarian regime. I believe that the same could well have happened with a Hungarian in Britain at this time; or with an Arab in either Hungary or Britain nowadays, in the age of global terrorism.

Some GDR athletes paid a high price for that regime s pursuit of sporting excellence; but it seems to me that, here too, this is only one side of the coin. Today s public authorities often lack the funding to maintain the sporting facilities built in GDR times, and these served broader swathes of the population than participate in sport in most Western countries.

In a local newspaper I read recently that the proportion of Halle children who do not learn to swim has risen substantially since There is widespread concern nationally with obesity among children, and it seems clear that in the former GDR this is due at least in part to a decline in the provision of healthy food through a school canteen and in sporting activity at school. About half way between my room and the central University buildings was the Soviet cultural centre, where it was possible to buy Melodija records at prices which were a fraction of Western prices and the quality of the recordings left nothing to be desired.

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A few hundred metres away in the other direction I had the choice of Supraphon records in the Czechoslovak cultural centre and the Eterna label in the centre of the German Democratic Republic. Of course Hungarian Qualiton records were available everywhere. Politically they took up quite different positions, some linking up with the nationalist right.

It is surely no accident that Romania does not figure among the countries indicated here.

Together with the Soviet Union, this was the neighbouring state to which it was very hard for Hungarians to forget any positive associations. At the same time, through this approach, I wish to explore the much more important question as to the ways in which the Yugoslav variety of socialism, as developed in a centralized communist and ideologically bound state, affected the everyday lives of the people in that country. The time frame I am considering is some four decades beginning with the early s.

The events recounted here from memory are not intended as the established view of the past, but rather as selected reflections on happenings now long past. As I came to know it, the Yugoslav communist system was far from as brutal as in Albania, where there was, for example, an attempt to abolish religious institutions. Nor was it as dogmatic as in Bulgaria, which had a dominant orientation, based on its unswerving allegiance to the Soviet Union.

Nevertheless, the Yugoslav system was, in essence, based on an autocratic organization of power and privilege using the Stalinist idea of democratic centralism. Thus, in my view, ultimate power always resided with the police and the army as directed by the Party. Milovan Djilas, of course, first publicly discussed these ideas in the early s, first in a series of articles and, subsequently, in several books which he had significant time to create during his multiple jail terms imposed by his wartime colleague Tito.

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This did not mean necessarily that Yugoslav government policy as developed by the Communist Party was always uniformly interpreted and implemented in this historically and ethnically diverse country. Early in my work I was impressed, for example, by the diverse manifestations of state policy I encountered at the Foreign and Interior Ministries and their local manifestations in my daily experiences in places as different as universities and villages.

In this perspective I only suggest that, while there were to me seemingly different worlds of the public face of the government and the reality of local manifestations, there was, on the one hand, the official world of constructing new political forms of political organization as in constitutional revisions and the formal experimenting with social policy as in Workers Self Management.

But, on the other hand, in all the years that Tito and his associates were in power there never was anything resembling a free public opinion to say nothing of steps toward a truly democratic system where competing ideas, ideologies and programs were linked to a meaningful electoral process.

Even the manifestations and consequences of official policies always had a strong regional difference. Thus while the formal political policies were essentially the same in Slovenia and Kosovo, the manifestations were vastly different. C, the American invasion of Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the Madrid bombings, and other violence encounters one cannot, of course, be complacent and distanced in our analysis of the failures of Yugoslav socialism.

That said Western democracies do not act in the same ways as totalitarian states - witness the status of radical Muslims and Muslim communities in Western Europe and in the U. Most important, the inadequacies and brutalities of socialism in Yugoslavia are minor compared to the violent conflicts, large scale killings, and widespread destruction that characterized the struggles of the s in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo as the Yugoslav state disintegrated.

But there can be little question that the democratic centralism of socialist Yugoslavia played a significant role in setting the stage for these tragedies. I mention these matters because in the s in Yugoslavia the security forces of the Interior Ministry, then know by their initials as UDBA, were omnipresent in everyone s lives even though their actions were less severe than in Stalin s time in the Soviet Union.

In Western Europe, of course, the shadow of the Nazi past was much present in the s. America too had its security manias in this time of the manic U. Senator McCarthy whose tentacles reached into the U. Information Service Library in Belgrade. Fortunately their provinciality and stupidity confined their passions. They were, however, a challenge nevertheless. Yugoslav socialism clearly came into existence as a result of the victorious partisan struggle in World War II against the Nazi invaders along with the destruction of the pre-existing Yugoslav state.

Of course, there was simultaneously a brutal and very bloody internal civil war in which there were victors and the vanquished. The partisan victors created the new Yugoslavia as a socialist, Communist state. Using as their sense of legitimacy and absolute justification and rationale for all state action their defeat of the invaders, they memo-.

These monuments were exclusively for the victors. The vanquished opponents in the civil war were banished from history. Their names were on no monuments, nor were their views given any voice in the torrent of publications memorializing the NOB, the People s Liberation War. It surely is an irony of history that when in the s the Serbian army gunners surrounded Sarajevo and purposely targeted the National Library, the priceless Ottoman era manuscripts were destroyed while somehow the literature of socialist Yugoslavia survived because of its location in the library.

Also destroyed by the Serbian gunner was the museum of Gavrilo Princip, the assassin of the Archduke Ferdinand. Tito s image was omnipresent there were the expected portraits in public offices and front pieces in schoolbooks. But there was a whole iconography of Tito in various media in bronze busts, wood carvings, and portraits the benign father for children, the fearless warrior for the military, the statesman for the foreign ministry, the devout apprentice for the workers, the thoughtful leader as an inspiration for the intellectuals.

Fittingly much of this imagery now resides on a humorous Web site. To make the system work it was, of course, necessary, first, to suppress all potential political opposition that might endanger the system. This necessitated the execution of primary opponents and the imprisonment of those who were deemed less of a threat.

His former close associate Milovan Djilas has given a useful view of this process in its initial stages since he was complicit in the securing of power. Thus the slogan Brotherhood and Unity, continued to be officially espoused long after it had lost its essential meaning. This suppression of conflict both actual and potential between national groups was one reason that the system ultimately disintegrated so rapidly and so completely amidst the mass killings of the s. This comment, of course, begs the question as to why some former communist states like Czechoslovakia were able to peacefully split into national components without violence.

A portion of that explanation certainly lies in the historic conflicts between Rome and Byzantium, between Orthodoxy, as manifested in churches linked to a national heritage, and the universality of the Catholic Church. To this must, of course, be added the significance of the presence of Islam in Europe, a question hardly resolved in Europe today in countries outside of the Balkans.

The events of the s and the subsequent breakup of Yugoslavia and the emergence of new states did, however, create a new time frame, which bracketed the existence of Yugoslav socialism. In all my experiences in what was Yugoslavia from the s through the s, life courses of people of my generation were always bracketed by the time frame, pre i poslje rata before and after the War, i.

Now, of course, there are whole sets of new meanings attached to this expression, the before and after obviously referring to the wars of the s.

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The well-known events after World War II do, however, provide an indispensable background for my personal exploration of the impacts of Yugoslav socialism. T he thrust of this essay is an attempt, by means of an abbreviated memoir, to explore how Yugoslav socialism impacted everyday life in the former Yugoslavia. My observations derive from my periods of intermittent residence from the early fifties into the s.

Subsequent stays in the succeeding decades varied from summers to multiple residences of six months to a year or more. In the s and the first decade of the 21st century visits were of shorter duration but did involve travel in war zones. It cannot be too strongly stressed that when we my wife and I first arrived in Yugoslavia in the summer of it was the height of the Cold War.

Given my age I was born in I was then barely Although I had had a bicycle tour of Western Europe in and had traveled extensively in North America, this was my first visit to a Communist country. Also I had no overt family ties to Europe as my ancestors had all migrated to America by the beginning of the 20th century.

But in education I was very much a product of this Cold War. In the late s, while an undergraduate majoring in history at the University of Michigan, I had become interested in Eastern Europe and what was then the Soviet Union. As a graduate student while I was engaged in the Ph.

These courses dealt with Russia and the Soviet Union its economy, legal system, history, and literature. I had a somewhat unique and challenging education in a mix of courses that I designed for myself. In a given semester I would have courses in human evolution, physical anthropology, and at the Russian Institute, Marxian economics; similarly there was anthropological theory and the international relations of the Soviet Union; or Russian literature and kinship systems etc.

It is a wonder I survived with a coherent outlook and that my graduate career was not destroyed. Overall, there were consequences of this being then the height of the Cold War. He ultimately died in disgrace, but not before he had inflicted much damage on American society. He also caused great difficulties for many Americans who were loyal citizens.

Some years ago, I explored the Columbia University Archives and found ample evidence as to how this period affected my professors, who were among the most prominent in the study of Soviet and East European affairs in the United States. Many were engaged in extensive consultation with their personal lawyers should they ever be brought before a congressional committee of inquiry! At the time, I was very much involved in my studies and not politically active. But this is not to say that I was totally unaware of the world around me. For one thing Columbia University was in New York City with its long history of political radicalism.

More directly intruding on my. I clearly remember befriending an older man, for me then he was a fascinating anthropological linguist. He had been an instructor in anthropology at the nearby City College of N. I was not sophisticated enough to realize that our conversations on linguistics and related anthropological topics had an instrumental focus.

One day we went for a long walk and he broached to me the idea that I might be interested in joining the C. I knew that he had recently been dismissed from his untenured position at City College because of his Party affiliation. This was, of course, a daring invitation given the tenor of the times. I do not remember being fearful of exploring this course of action, but was simply disinterested.

He subsequently resumed his career at the University in Mexico City. These events took place in and McCarthy s downfall was then some years off. It should be noted that in addition to intellectual activity there was one academically related individual who was brought to trial as a Soviet agent and convicted.

This was the case with one anthropologist, who was an academic associate of one of my professors, Margaret Mead. He wrote about East Central Europe but he had a research position and not a university appointment. Finally, one of my anthropology professors was dismissed from Columbia. Her specialty was African studies.

I do not know if she was an actual member of the Communist Party, but she publicly charged that the U. She was subsequently dismissed from the Columbia faculty for these actions. Like the anthropologist who taught at City College she also subsequently but later resumed her career teaching at a smaller and less wellknown University in the New York metropolitan area and had a reasonably successful career.

Anthropology in the s was then much oriented toward the notion of fieldwork in non-western cultures as a way to validate one s professional status. But given the then nature of the Soviet Union and its attitude toward foreigners generally and Americans in particular there was no chance for me at that time to undertake fieldwork in that country or, with much effectiveness, elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

But Yugoslavia was different. Yugoslavia, of course, had had in an ideological break with the Soviet Union revolving, in part, about the ability of an Eastern European communist state to pursue an independent path to socialism communism. This led to a severing of communist party relations between Yugoslavia and the USSR in Although as of Yugoslavia was still an orthodox communist state, its break with the Soviet Union made it a desired setting for U.

Thus at the time of my initial visit there in there were very extensive United States civilian and military assistance programs by the U. Subsequently by the s the extent of American food and economic aid to Yugoslavia had become enormous. During that decade the accumulation of local currency by the American embassy had become enormous, for all food aid as well as other aid was paid for in local currency. During that time, I was told by personnel at the American embassy that their bank account held about 10 percent of the value of all Yugoslav currency in circulation, an obviously intolerable situation.

As a result the major part of this bank account went for public works projects like the Dalmatian costal highway. But there were also, relatively, huge amounts of funds for academic research by U. But all these developments were in the s, then very much in the future. It should be carefully noted that I have gone into all this detail because a significant portion of my researches in Yugoslavia in the early s was supported by these funds. My professor of international relations at Columbia, Philip Mosely, had, in addition to his academic role as a founder of East European Studies in the U.

He also had been an advisor at key conferences between the U. He had participated in conferences at the foreign minister level during the war in Moscow. In the immediate post-war period he had attended the Potsdam conference between Truman and Stalin and Churchill and later Atlee as an advisor to the American delegation. In sum, he had extensive experience in negotiating with the Soviets during and prior to the period. With respect to Slovenia Mosely had also been one of the principal U. This dispute was finally concluded only in the s when we were already in Yugoslavia.

But from my personal point of view, most significant was the curious fact that in the immediate prewar period, in the late s, he had been encouraged by an American research foundation, the Social Science Research Council New York to undertake social science field research in the Balkans.

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As a result Mosely engaged in extensive field researches on the extended family unit, the zadruga, within Yugoslavia but also in neighboring Balkan countries as well. He had received a fellowship from this organization on the eve of World War II, but did not accept it because he chose to remain in his homeland even though conflict was then clearly inevitable. My fate was then decided.

At that time visiting foreign students, especially those who wished to undertake research in rural areas, were something of a rarity, so we had to make our own way through the system. A series of small events set the stage for our initial understanding of part of the dynamics of Yugoslav socialist society.

I also detail all this background to illustrate the fact that my selection of Yugoslavia as a research area was very much embedded in the political context of the time. However, for my research I had to use my personal family resources since no financial assistance was forthcoming. Thus in this respect, despite the context of the times, my initial research in Yugoslavia was independent of any organizational impetus. In June , when we first arrived in Yugoslavia, despite the large existing American aid program and the earlier break with Stalin, that state was still very much an orthodox communist system operating in a relatively poor and marginal country with a significant part of its economy peasant based.

The massive program of industrialization had not yet really begun and the large-scale migrations to the cities were still getting under way. The significant achievements of Yugoslav socialism in building a modern industrial economy were in prospect, but communist state power was already consolidated. An aspect of the confirmation of state power entailed the techniques for the purposeful manipulation of public opinion to support the implementation of state policies. Such manipulation, which had its limitations, was played out in many ways. A local example of that purposeful manipulation took place in the early part of our initial stay.

Viewed from an early 21st century perspective the long-lasting significance of the events described below can be seen as, at best, marginal to the historical record. However, from a personal perspective, they were overwhelmingly significant to me and nearly ended my work in Yugoslavia. One day the village council president invited us to accompany him and some other local officials to a meeting rally in the nearby rail and market town of Mladenovac. It also then had a few nascent industries.

Something presumably important had happened and we did not know quite what. Our household lacked a functioning radio and they did not get a daily newspaper this was, of course, in the days before TV had begun to make its appearance in rural Serbia. We left the village the next day at dawn to arrive in time for the rally. There were no private automobiles in the village then so we went by horse carriage fiacre of the kind I had seen only used in the village for weddings. The site of the gathering was a huge, open field adjoining the rail junction.

As we approached the site I noticed long lines of boxcars which I later learned had been used to transport peasants and workers to the rally from various places in Serbia. While the relatively short ride was a bit uncomfortable given the state of the springs of the carriage the discomfort did not seem to exceed that of riding on a crowded urban bus at rush hour with windows closed. It was not until a decade later that the Yugoslav economy had matured to the extent that buses could be used. In any case, people were arriving in a large stream, pouring out of the boxcars and onto the open fields.

We kept close to our village friends but I also had a camera and ventured a photo of some of the placards. At that point a senior police official came by and suggested that my wife and I accompany him to headquarters. There he asked for our passports and proceeded to enlighten us about the crisis and the reason for the rally. He began by inquiring if I knew that the Americans were responsible for excluding Yugoslavia from their claimed territories in the region of Trieste? Our village friends had, of course, mentioned nothing about this, only indicating that we might enjoy a visit to a meeting which we naturally assumed would be combined with a large local market.

It seemed apparent that the official was quoting from the most recent edition of the communist party newspaper Borba , which was invariably found in good supply in all the official offices we visited. I did recall that my Columbia professor had been the American representative on that boundary commission but, of course, I said nothing. Following the lecture he suggested that we would need protection from the genuine outrage of the workers and peasants who were attending the rally.

I did not protest his decision but only expressed my appreciation. Neither my film nor camera was confiscated. I put my camera away and we were assigned two officers who proceeded to follow us around for the rest of the afternoon. They were apparently good friends since they held hands, as good friends do in parts of Eastern Europe and the Middle East. They seemed self-absorbed and the day passed without further incident. We had heard in Belgrade that he was famous for his tailored suits, but we did not get close enough to check this out. On the way back our village hosts said nothing about our encounter with the police, but since we were in the village under official auspices with a formal letter of introduction there was no outward evidence of their concern.

After some fifty years this incident would seem to have merited little more than a mention as a small detail of our stay. But that did not turn out to be the case. It has often been remarked that youth is stupid and certainly young apprentice anthropologists are no exception to this rule. After this encounter I was determined to return to Belgrade immediately. But there was no stopping me. The next morning we boarded the narrow gauge train in a neighboring village and then transferred to a standard gauge train at Mladenovac for our trip to Belgrade.

We made the trip of approximately km in just under six hours because we managed to catch an express train to Belgrade at our transfer point. Although determinedly curious about the context of the rally about Trieste, once in Belgrade I was so self possessed and pleased to return to our urban apartment that it never occurred to me that there was any danger to my person and to vary my usual urban routes. Therefore I first visited some of my favorite bookstores to browse for research materials and then walked over to the U.

Of course, I might have first checked the local press. As I crossed the lot adjoining the library made vacant by German bombing during World War II I suddenly felt a pinprick and then another and a mob surrounded me. I broke free and started to run. As I entered the main street fronting on the Student Square I noticed a woman being herded by a jeering mob. On her back was a sign reading in Serbian: One who takes the American embassy bulletin. Just about that time a waiter called out to me from a nearby restaurant to get the sign off my back. I rounded the corner and in panic headed back to the U.

As I got up the journalist Helen Thomas who later was the senior correspondent at the White House becoming a fixture there for decades proceeded to interview me. She explained that her story would be front page news in the U. Present readers will find this part of my story quaint, as there once was a time when an American student being beaten up by a foreign mob would have been a major news story. At that time at the height of communist red baiting led by McCarthy there really was a market for nasty articles about all aspects of communism.

Only a few weeks before, two assistants of that American senator had visited Belgrade and inspected the American library for subversive communist literature. The American diplomat who guided them around helped them reach the conclusion that such evidence was lacking. The fact that Yugoslavia was a functioning communist state, then in an alliance of mutual convenience with the United States, apparently escaped these guardians of American virtue. After the interview with the journalist two American diplomats escorted me to my apartment. On our walk there they told me stories about how they had closed down the American consulate in Shanghai in after the victory of the Chinese communists.

Unintentionally, they nicely set the stage for what was to follow. They left me at the door apparently unaware that we had been followed. As I stepped inside a group of Yugoslav police in plain clothes, masquerading as outraged citizens began to beat me. I first shouted to them in Serbian and then as the beating intensified I switched to English. The instructions issued to the organized demonstrators and widely disseminated were that foreigners were not to be harmed. They then left, apparently convinced that I was indeed a foreigner.

I do not remember great pain and my injuries were not serious but they had significantly bloodied me. Later I was given refuge in the nearby apartment of a friend from the American embassy. I could hear the organized demonstrators on nearby Marshal Tito Street shouting the by now familiar refrain We will give our lives but not Trieste.

Later, when I made a visit to the embassy, I was told that they would protest on my behalf but that this would be the end of my work in Yugoslavia. I chose not to complain. Later, at a cocktail party I met an American colonel with the U. Military Assistance Group to Yugoslavia, they had a large building in the center of Belgrade.

He told me that prior to the demonstrations a colleague on the Yugoslav army s general staff told him that there would be no demonstrations in front of the building housing the U. Certainly this tale of minor events long ago has few surprising aspects. Neither the duplicity of the Yugoslav state, or for that matter, the many faces of the American government are surprising.

Nor, it should be added, was the total indifference of the local population unexpected. Finally, it should be noted that despite the cries of the organized demonstrators then marching through downtown Belgrade, the whole matter was subsequently settled relatively quietly through diplomatic negotiation. Yugoslavia gave up claims to certain areas near Trieste. The fate of the city itself had, however, never been in question, it always remained under Italian jurisdiction. But there is another factor involved and that is and was the extreme national and historical divisions within the territories that composed the Yugoslav state.

Slovenes were and are, of course, concerned about their borders with Italy and their other neighboring states and the people of Slovene nationality who live there. Clearly, these concerns were not shared with people in Serbia, just as more recently Slovenes early on uninvolved themselves in the wars accompanying the disintegration of Yugoslavia.

One could go through a long list of such regionally manifested concerns. The communist slogans of the past, including that of Brotherhood and Unity, were clearly an illusion from the beginning. My bloody head massage was clearly minor, but what about the situation of the poor woman whom I had seen being paraded before the organized mob? Obviously the international press had not bothered to report her situation. I mistakenly opened the wrong door and saw an older peasant being beaten. A local woman had heard about our arrival.

She demanded of us as to why, when there are so many nice places in Yugoslavia, had we come to this poor and backward village, which she soon hoped to leave. Subsequently, we learned that she was absent from the village for some months. When she returned, we never had the opportunity to speak to her again, nor for her sake were we anxious to do so. This incident must, of course, be seen in a broader reality.

We later learned that her brother had been killed in a robbery of his Chicago restaurant. Much more important to our research was an event associated with the local elementary school. I had thought that it would be nice to sponsor an essay contest in which the children could write about the village and their aspirations for the future.

I even offered some modest prizes. The director of the school and the teachers cooperated and I received a significant number of essays. Very fortunately neither the school principal nor the teachers made any effort to read the pupils work prior to turning over the papers to me. I took the school essays to Belgrade and went over them carefully. Most of the student essays were about the glories of Serbian history, the modernization of the village, and the partisan heroes. Some of them obviously based on the school textbooks, but a few were obviously original and described the actualities of village life.

But one essay was different. In the words of the pupil the partisans were not liberators but destroyers for they had burned part of the village. I determined to leave this essay out of my ethnographic account. The student described how her family s home had been burned and provided a color illustration.

What to do with the student s material? It seemed obvious to me it could cause trouble for the parents and for the child as well. It would also have made life difficult for the teachers and school principal who had helped me. I destroyed the essay and drawing and to this day I remember burning it. I tossed the ashes in the toilet bowl and flushed away the remnants. I was glad to protect the student but I was also ashamed of my censorship.

I had accommodated myself to the system through this self-censorship. But what exactly was the system to which people were accommodating? In this essay I cannot do more than give a brief explanation. First, it is important to observe that enormous changes were under way throughout Eastern and Southern Europe during the second half of the 20th century quite apart from the dominant ideological system in a particular country. Overall, there were the ongoing processes of industrialization and urbanization and with it technological modernization. This was taking place at a rapid rate not only in Yugoslavia but also in all the non-communist countries that bordered on Yugoslavia such as Italy and Greece.

For us the early s provided a kind of baseline against which to measure future change. Communism, of course, put something of a special face on these changes, but the long-term transformations made that centralist ideology increasingly irrelevant. A small but significant indicator of the changes was the changes in the types of garbage that the society produced. We observed in the village in the early s how virtually nothing was thrown away including used tin cans.

These were turned into receptacles and even cooking utensils of various kinds. There was also real poverty in this period. People were accustomed to wearing patched old clothes, especially in the villages. I well recall the minimum tableware we had then in the village. There were badly made aluminum forks and spoons that broke and bent easily. These contrasted with the sturdy homemade wooden spoons when there was a greater degree of isolation and self-sufficiency in the village economy.

I recall asking myself as to how it was possible for a people who could not even produce useable basic household items such as cutlery to have defeated such a technologically superior foe. We were reminded of this every evening at dinner time when mixed in with the poor quality aluminum tableware were the remnants of a German soldier s field kit which included a stainless steel knife and fork.

Therein, of course, lies the primary justification for, and the ultimate legitimization of the regime. The Communist partisans had won both against their civil war opponents, the remnants of the royalist government in Serbia, as well as, at the same time, the struggle against the Nazi invaders and their fascist associates in Croatia. The other justification for the regime was that its socialist form of government would bring an equitable form of modernization. But the initial changes resulting from these processes of change, although widely shared, also brought with them a hierarchical, entrenched bureaucracy with a monopoly on the methods of innovation that were always imposed from above.

From the outset people were primarily not inspired but coerced. This happened despite the enthusiasm of some youthful cadre who contributed unskilled labor to road and railroad construction. There was also the constant drumbeat of propaganda about social ownership, and worker participation in a so-called shared self-management system along with every few years a new constitution touting these and other new forms of political participation. I began by focusing on garbage, or rather the lack of it.

Peasant villagers and urban workers began to experience the throwaway culture of plastic beginning in the s. It is certainly true that life did improve in a material way for most everyone. But this achievement did not bring lasting satisfaction. This occurred despite the fact that Tito successfully transitioned from wartime leader to acceptable father figure. In the fifties there were then no plastic items to speak of, just as newspaper was used more often than the less available toilet paper, and acceptable hand soap was not easily obtainable.

It was a time when women on boarding a bus would carefully arrange their skirts before sitting down so as not to put much stress on the fabric.

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Burlap sacks and crude paper bags were used to carry home the few items purchased from the limited inventory in the state stores. Within a decade, however, the throwaway. The s saw the cautious beginning of this mass consumption culture along with the innovation of the supermarket and TV.

Now there was a mass of cheap items on the market designed for immediate use and not for long-term retention. Did the transitions in consumer goods, mass marketing, mass consumption in a way relate to transitions in the political culture that was also concerned with novelty, innovation, and mass appeal? Yesterday s versions of both were certainly discarded rather than recycled in the decades to come. These matters can more easily be measured in the villages, the countryside, than in the towns.

For in the latter there was trash collection that, of course, was unknown in the village. Thus village homes began to accumulate less perishable detritus in their surroundings. Rotten vegetables, spoiled meat, old wooden implements could all be counted on to slowly return to the soil but not plastic. The appearance of the private automobile in the socialist state was also a transforming force. With its increasing use came greater mobility not only within Yugoslavia but across international borders.

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