Next week a bunch of us from London are heading down to Germany to discuss the future of Southeast European studies with a bunch of colleagues and friends from other universities. In general the world has less interest in our field than it did in the 1990s. On the one hand, this is a bad thing, because we are doing all of this work that a shrinking number of people care about (also there is less interest in the world, and at our universities, in supporting this work). On the other hand, this is a good thing, because the only reason people were interested in the area in the 1990s were because of the horrific violence that was being done, and then afterward there was interest because a few powerful countries in the world made a halfhearted attempt to export some ideology and “reform” until violence somewhere else made them lose interest.
But the war in Ukraine has changed everything. Or has it? One of the questions we are being asked to consider is “has the war led to renewed interest in the region?” One answer could be no, it has contributed to accelerating the decline of interest in the region by concentrating attention on a different region. But the answer could also be yes, in the sense that the war has compelled Europe to think about security as more central to its overall purpose and identity than ever before, and as a result to refocus on their persistent security problems. Among those problems are, of course, the periodic nasty flares in bilateral relations between the states of Southeast Europe.
So that is a type of attention. It’s a bad type of attention. What a concern with “security” always means is that attention is focused on the people currently holding power, and what they can or cannot do while acting in the name of states. It puts at the centre the interests of powerful outside intervenors whose principal interest is knowing who to ask for what and the probability that they will get it. A bunch of people who are smarter than me have labelled this “stabilotocracy”: “exchange of stability for external lenience on matters of democracy.”
Basically “stabilitocracy” means that Europe and the US allow politics in the states of the region to oscillate along the spectrum between nonexistence and crap because any advance for democracy might bring in leaders who are unpredictable and/or uncontrollable. This is what gets you decades of Vučićes and Ramae, Đukanovićes alternating position with Vučić clones, and all the things the great Welsh poet John Cale described as „what endlessness ahead.“
I don’t need to tell you what the basic weakness of “stabilitocracy” is because you already know. It is that systems that appear to be stable but are not legitimate are unsustainable. They will come down in a mess of disorder, leave no clear pathways forward to replace them, and leave a lot of people, some of whom deserve it and some of whom do not, holding the bag.
There is a related question we are being asked to think about, “will the region become a refuge for Russianists who cannot do research on/in Russia any more?” We can only hope not! There is nothing to be gained from a lot of people entering a situation with which they are not familiar thinking that it is a tangentially related situation with which they were once familiar. Having said that, it will probably happen. Both the pandemic and the war in Ukraine have compelled a lot of people to develop non-contact forms of research, much of it using electronic resources and communication devices. This has been good, in the sense that it has led to very rapid development of methodologies for things like data mining and virtual ethnography. But nobody will be satisfied with that for long. Eventually our field is likely to get an inmigration of Russianists and some new recruits from early career people who would have done research in Russia but cannot.
This is fine as long as they do not come in asking the same questions they were asking under different conditions. We have all seen this in the region around election time. International media, looking for a reason to persuade anyone to care about our little countries, inevitably turn every contest into a match up between “pro-Russian” and “pro-Western” forces, even when these categories have little or nothing to do with the substance of the choice. To the degree that these distinctions apply to anything a party would do if it were in power, these distinctions mostly apply to things that have no effect on the lives of citizens. There is also probably some element of deliberate misunderstanding of the content of “pro-Russian” stances and how tenuously they are related to any knowledge about or attitude toward Russia, rather than standing for other barely related forms of social resentment and fear.
There is no need to be dismissive here: Russian studies have been the source of a lot of ideas that are extremely productive in understanding the region and in understanding the world more broadly. These include approaches to public memory and its disputed character, to the persistence of securitised apparatuses of power, and to the character and durability of informal networks. At the same time, they have been the source of a lot of genuinely bad ideas about polarity and ethnonational identity.
On balance, there may or may not be some renewed interest in the region. To the degree that there is, there is not much to be hoped for from it. This is because neither old nor new generations of researchers have done well in enough in addressing the most important structural social questions, as opposed to the superficial political questions. This means that there are two crucial categories of questions we do not know enough about. These include:
· How do we develop ideas and methodologies that will help to account for people whose lives are not expressed by the national purity doxa in power, or by the dominant international ideologies [choose your label] that sometimes support and sometimes oppose them?
· What happens when the jingoists go away (because they will)?
I wish I could be there.