Vidovdan as a Battlefield: Two Columns on One Square

A week ago I was standing in a bank queue in Uzice, listening to two men argue about where they would be on 27 June. One said he was going to Belgrade “to see how many of us there are.” The other, younger, said he was going “to the other gathering, the real one.” Neither of them mentioned a programme, or demands, or a single sentence about what was actually supposed to happen. They mentioned only the square, the date and the number. That was the moment I understood that this year we will not be marking Vidovdan, we will be playing it.

Aleksandar Vucic announced on 30 May that a series of rallies would be held across Serbia from 26 to 28 June, with a central gathering in Belgrade on 27 June where, he said, programme and personnel decisions would be presented. That same weekend the student movement is calling citizens to its side, leaning on the crowd it already showed on 23 May, when the estimate stood at around 200,000 people. Two calls, two squares, one date. And one holiday that, as a rule, nobody is willing to surrender to anyone else.

Why Vidovdan, and not some ordinary weekend?

In the Serbian public sphere, Vidovdan stopped being a mere date on the calendar long ago. It is, to borrow a term from the sociology of memory, a site of collective remembrance that still hurts, a hook on which everything is hung, from the Battle of Kosovo to every later political generation that wanted to say “we are the heirs.” That is why choosing 27 June, the day before the holiday, is anything but accidental. It is a deliberate occupation of a symbol before someone else occupies it.

This is where you can see how far our politics has become a fight over frames rather than over content. In the 1950s the American sociologist Erving Goffman wrote about how people “manage impressions,” how they choose the stage on which they will perform. Today’s Serbia does this at the level of an entire state. What matters is who stands on Slavija and who on the Square of the Republic, who has the longer column, whose flag the drone can see. Substance is assumed, and in fact barely exists. Three things remain as the only real stake:

• the square as a physical space conquered by the number of bodies
• the date as a symbol that lends legitimacy to whoever seizes it
• the image, because whatever is not filmed from the air might as well never have happened

Vucic framed his stake plainly, almost like a director announcing a show.

Over those three days we will organise several large events, both in Belgrade and across Serbia, and present major programme matters.

Programme matters, then, come only in third place, after the events and after Belgrade. The order of the words is not innocent. First the stage, and only then, perhaps, the content.

What are we actually measuring when we measure a crowd?

The temptation is to treat this whole weekend as simple arithmetic: this many of them, this many of us, who won. But here I owe it to myself to contradict my own argument. A crowd is not an argument. A hundred thousand people on a square does not prove that anyone is right, it only proves that someone managed to bring a hundred thousand people onto a square. That is an organisational fact, not a moral one. Both the government and the students like to blur the two, because it suits both of them to let the number stand in for the argument.

What worries me as an observer is neither column. What worries me is that both have agreed to the same language. When a protest and a counter-rally share the same date, the same city and the same holiday, they are no longer two opposing ideas, they are two teams in the same match, with the same referee (the camera) and the same rule (the number). An atomised society, one in which people no longer recognise each other as fellow citizens but as supporters of rival sides, looks exactly like this. Vucic, incidentally, also repeated that elections would be held this year, which means this Vidovdan is not the end of the story but a warm-up for it.

Let us go back to those two men in the bank queue. Neither was the other’s enemy. They were neighbours, they had probably known each other by sight for years. And yet, for 27 June, they were already assigned to two columns, as if someone had drawn a line through the city and through the holiday in advance. Perhaps the real question to carry away from this piece is simply this: if both sides believe that on Vidovdan they are defending Serbia, how is it that at the end of the day we defend it from one another, rather than together?