Corruption in Serbia Is Not a Flaw of People but the Habitus of a System

In a taxi about ten days ago, as we climbed toward Vraca, the driver opened the conversation with a sentence I have heard at least a hundred times in the last thirty years. He said: “Your boss may once have been honest, but the moment he climbs the ladder he has to take, because if he does not take, the others will assume he does not know how.” He looked at me in the rear-view mirror, as if checking whether the sentence had surprised me.

It had not. What had surprised me was that the sentence had been spoken with the same calm with which one might say that the rain falls because it comes from the west. Without moral judgement, without accusation, without surprise. Like a sociologically factual statement.

I thought then that the driver, not knowing it, had spoken one of the most precise statements about Serbian society I had heard that week.

The habitus as lasting arrangement

I pivot to the sociology of the French thinker Pierre Bourdieu, who in the book “Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste” (Editions de Minuit, 1979; Serbian translation, Zavod za udzbenike, 2013) developed the concept of habitus. Bourdieu defined it roughly as follows:

Habitus is a system of durable, transposable dispositions, a structured structure predisposed to function as a structuring structure, which produces and organises practices and representations without any need for rules consciously to govern them.

The sentence is academically heavy, but its point is simple. The habitus is what people do before they think. The habitus is the bodily inscribed knowledge of how things are done here, of how they are not done, of how one succeeds, of how one survives.

In Serbian society, the habitus of clientelism is inscribed across generations. The taxi driver from Vraca neither defends it nor approves of it; he simply registers it as a fact of the environment, the way a meteorologist registers atmospheric pressure. When you see an activist arrested on Senjak for helping the flight of a defendant in the same affair, and when you see 26 people arrested in an Interior Ministry operation for the diversion of 203 million dinars from the budget, you are watching the same dispositions realising themselves in two different social spaces.

Three waves of transition

The Serbian sociologist Mladen Lazic, in the book “Post-Socialist Transformation and the Restratification of Serbian Society” (Filip Visnjic, 2011), describes the Serbian transition through three waves of restratification. Each produced its own form of corrupt habitus.

The first wave, in the nineties, formed the structure of wartime survival, in which circumventing the rules was the basis of economic activity. The second wave, after 2000, formed the structure of party capitalism, in which access to resources came through loyalty to the ruling party. The third wave, after 2012, formed the structure of administrative capitalism, in which the line between party, state and business became administratively invisible.

The consequence is sociologically precise and predictable:

• the generation born before 1980 experienced all three systems and knows the rules of each
• the generation born after 1990 has experienced only the third system and does not know it was ever otherwise
• in both cases, the habitus of clientelism is transmitted as a family grammar rather than a choice

When a Serbian taxi driver says that “he has to take, because if he does not take, the others will think he does not know how,” he is describing the rule of the third wave but recognising it as permanent, as gravity.

A memory that hurts

Here, at this point in the essay, I enter a subject difficult to lay out in the Opinion column but one I cannot avoid. Corruption in Serbian society is not only a problem of money and power. It is at the same time a memory that hurts, as I would put it. The generations that in the nineties were left without wages, without pensions, without flats, learned that the rules do not protect but punish anyone who obeys them.

A boss who does not take in a system where he is expected to take is not a moral hero. He is sociologically an outsider, because he breaches the expectations of his surroundings, which carries sanctions: mistrust, lost contacts, isolation. The Bourdieusian habitus reproduces itself through sanction, not through rule.

In that logic, anti-corruption operations, arrests and convictions are never enough to change the structure. They can change the actors but not the stage. Senjak yesterday, an Interior Ministry operation today, some other case tomorrow, will not change the taxi driver on Vracar who already on a Tuesday morning utters his sentence as a fact of meteorology.

The counter-argument from the ruling circles

Here comes the counter-argument often heard from those who back removals and detentions. By that logic, the Serbian state is showing resolve in the fight against corruption, because it arrests, indicts and prosecutes. The statistics on arrests in recent months are higher than ever. Is that not a sign of change.

The argument has partial truth, because the arrests are real, the cases are being prosecuted, the detention orders have been issued. But sociologically the argument is superficial. The arrest of an individual does not change the habitus. A change of habitus requires a different education, a different public sphere, a different economy in which work pays, a different judicial system in which the rule is applied without distinction. None of this is happening simultaneously with the arrests.

When after a year or two the count of anti-corruption arrests is measured against the involvement of the top of the system, the top, as a rule, remains untouched. The arrests reach the middle strata, which are replaceable, while the general mechanism reproduces itself.

Back to the taxi driver

I return to the taxi in the opening of this essay. As we were pulling up at my building, the driver said one more sentence, which I record here in full: “You can write what you like, professor. But until you change the way we look at each other, nothing will be different.”

What does he mean by that exactly.

He means that clientelism is not reformed by decree. It is reformed through a change in the expectations we have of one another. A boss who does not take can exist in the system only when the other bosses stop seeing him as an outcast. A driver who proposes honesty can exist only when the other drivers stop seeing him as naive.

The question I would leave with readers, which I share with those who have stayed to the end, runs roughly like this. If, say, tomorrow we recognised someone holding a public office who does not use it for their own benefit, how would we look at them. With respect or with suspicion. And, the harder sociological question, are we sure our first answer would be honest rather than merely politically correct.