After Slavija, 23 faces: the count that matters more than the number

At Banca Intesa on Slavija, on the Friday morning after the rally, a woman in the queue told the teller she would like to draw her pension earlier than it was due, because “from Sunday onwards it will be chaos and the money is better off at home”. The teller nodded, keyed in the request and, without looking up, added that she was not the only one there for the same reason. Three people behind her laughed, not exactly happily.

I keep returning to that scene as I read the news that the Ministry of the Interior detained exactly 23 people after a rally at which somewhere between 34,300 (official) and more than 100,000 (Archive of Public Gatherings) people had gathered. The difference between the pensioner and the detained is not legal, it is political. The pensioner presumes that every public event is a risk, the detained confirmed that presumption with their bodies. Between the two stands a woman explaining herself to a bank teller because she does not like the atmosphere in the country.

This is not an isolated case. Counting the detained after a mass gathering has become a genre in its own right in the Serbian public sphere. First the number is published, then the individual stories are pulled apart, on television their faces and names are shown, and all this lasts just long enough to shift the centre of attention from the rally to the incident. The procedure is so well-drilled that it can be described as a clientelistic inversion: the state gives individual attention to an individual, not because it protects them, but because it deals with them one by one.

Mladen Lazic, in his book “Waiting for Capitalism: The Emergence of New Class Relations in Serbia” (2011), distinguishes two kinds of relations in post-socialist systems, contractual and personal. In a normal public sphere, a citizen who comes out into the street answers according to general rules applied to everyone. In a system that always returns to the personal, the citizen answers as a person, with their name, photograph and family. That mechanism has its own logic: the protest is not dispersed by repressing the protest itself, but by subsequently personalising its participants. The message sent to the next wave is not “you must not”, but “we will see who was there”.

Here a counter-argument appears, which I must bring in myself, because the authorities will not formulate it. Perhaps the 23 detained were indeed taken in for specific criminal acts. Perhaps some of them threw rubbish containers, struck at police, caused disturbances. Let an independent and transparent prosecution establish this. The Helsinki Committee for Human Rights has announced that it will monitor the proceedings, and that is good. But institutional credibility is not built after a rally, it is tested at the rally itself. If those same institutions struggle to detain people filmed for months attacking student columns, while they process demonstrators within 48 hours without difficulty, the problem is not legal but political.

There is one more thing the public sphere must say out loud. Counting participants is not mathematics, it is a rhetorical discipline. The difference between 34,300 and 100,000 is not an estimation error, it is a political statement. The police methodology (square-occupancy) systematically underestimates, the organisers’ methodology (number of entry points) systematically inflates, and the Archive of Public Gatherings, with its method of analysing satellite and video records, comes closest to a reasonable middle. Yet what is remembered is the difference, not the middle. The next morning, at the teller in Banca Intesa, the woman drawing her pension does not weigh estimates, she weighs atmosphere. And atmosphere is the product of what is said after a rally.

In media sociology there is a term Jurgen Habermas, in “The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere” (1962, Serbian edition 1969), calls “the refeudalisation of the public sphere”. It refers to a process in which public space ceases to be a place where citizens exchange arguments and becomes a stage on which authority displays its power to citizens. After Slavija, this is precisely what has happened: power has been displayed. The state has not responded to the rally with a reform of electoral laws, nor with a genuine investment in the inquiry into the canopy collapse, but with a sequence of short shots of detained people and the minister’s address repeating “minimum force”. Refeudalisation does not require anyone to agree, it requires everyone to watch.

I come back to the woman at the teller. She was not at the rally, she will not be at the next one, and no one will ever detain her. But from one of these television programmes she drew a conclusion that is accurate in its illiteracy: “the money is better off at home”. What she says is not a political position, it is a sociological datum. An atomised society does not respond to repression with protest, it responds with withdrawal. Next month, if the 23 detained continue to appear in the headline news with their photographs, women like her will be even more numerous, and the columns on Slavija will still be large, only with a slightly smaller percentage gap between those who come out and those who would have come out, were it not for the atmosphere.

After every cycle of this kind, a question remains that a sociologist must put to themselves, not to the authorities. Do we, who write and comment, contribute to the dismantling or to the building of the public sphere when we return to the detained as a topic? The answer depends on whether we say their names in order to defend them, or only so that the number 23 will work as a clickable headline. The difference between those two is the difference between journalism and noise. This morning I choose for it not to be noise, but I know that will not be enough for the woman at the teller.