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Chapter 4 • Nicola Mai
firm any of the assertions or interpretations of events, but to underline
how, in this explanation, the responsibility of the politics and policies of
the Serb state are minimized through the deployment of narratives of discrimination
and self-victimization. An analysis of the narratives used by
Serbian IDPs reveals that self-victimization, denial, and conspiracy are the
three prevalent psychological and identitary strategies. These are generally
deployed to protect the Serbian collectivist identity according to its perceived
moral superiority. In the explanations provided by Serb IDPs, the
Albanians have paradoxically been blamed for the injustices and inequalities
caused by a political and social system that was itself entirely
involved in an articulation of Serbian identity, which legitimized the
Serbs’ privileged entitlement in the name of their perceived moral
superiority.
According to Renata Salecl’s analysis of the rise of nationalism in Eastern
Europe’ s post-communist countries, any form of “national identification”
with “our own kind” is based on the fantasy of an enemy; an alien that has
insinuated itself into “our society” and that constantly threatens us with
habits, discourse and rituals that are not of “our kind”. The perceived
threat here is that “the ‘Other’ will not find enjoyment in the same way as
we do.” With his different way of finding pleasure,
The Other further outrages our sense of the kind of nation our would like
to live in. He/she steals our enjoyment. To this must be added that this
Other is always an other in my interior, i.e. that my hatred of the Other is
really the hatred of the part (the surplus) of my own enjoyment which I
find unbearable and cannot acknowledge, and which I therefore transpose
(“project”) into the Other via a fantasy of the “Others’ enjoyment”
(Salecl, 1993: 105, emphasis in text).
For the refugees, questioning the Yugoslavian-Serbo-centric social and
cultural order would have meant de-stabilizing and breaking the narcissist
fantasies of moral superiority which had sustained them individually. Thus
the possibility of a critical approach had been repressed and responsibility
projected onto an ethnicized other. It therefore came as no surprise that
when analysing the period of growing antagonism between Serbs and
Albanians from the demonstrations of 1981 to the outbreak of war in 1999,
Albanians were deemed responsible for:
• Spreading narratives of manipulation in cooperation with foreign anti-
Serbian forces;
• Organizing strategic fictions such as the massive strikes (they were
allegedly not fired, but decided to quit their jobs) and the mass poisonings
(they were faking it to achieve international attention);
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