Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies

Cultural identities from the bottom up - labour
relations perspective
Maja Breznik
Abstract
The rise of new nation states in the region of Southeastern Europe is ironically happening
at the historic moment when most nation states are progressively giving away their
independence due to economic globalization. The state is no more “the omnipotent
master of its territory”, but one field is exempted: this relates to control over people and
determination of labour relations where “civic stratification” is paving the way for “social
stratification”. The main motive behind this is a reduction in labour rights in order to
achieve global competitiveness for a certain state with respect to “human resources”.
For this reason, we have decided to approach the re-questioning of cultural identities
from the bottom up, from the perspective of labour relations, taking as the subject of
our examination “authors” or, in short, the “creative class”. We will rephrase the initial
question accordingly by inverting the original phase of “cultural identities” into “identity
of cultural workers” and ask ourselves what the identity of cultural workers would be in
the context of their present labour relations.
Keywords: cultural identities, cultural workers, labour relations, wage, rent
Cultural and political elites have been traditionally tied in with the project of a nation
state built upon the presumption of one nation with one culture or, in the case of the
south-eastern region, the other way around (one culture – one nation). This relationship
was temporarily modified in socialist Yugoslavia when cultural elites had another
important function: the building of a unique type of socialism – self-management.
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