For present purposes three layers of the overall social structure will be singled out: 1) societal macro-structures (state, economy, politics, law, social stratification, symbolic universe), 2) everyday life as defined by these structures, and 3) individual and collective identities. A brief analysis of the relations between these three layers in the current Serbian society will be presented. The basic contention of the analysis is that a general failure at the institutional level has produced devastating consequences in the practices of everyday life of Serbia’s population, which in turn has produced gaps and voids in the usual mechanisms of identity formation.

The starting thesis here is that in recent years the regular institutional frameworks of Serbian society have been destroyed or thoroughly disorganized. The factors that triggered this process were, of course, in part the global geopolitical developments in the late 1980s and early 1990s, symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall. "Real socialism" as a political regime and a social system broke down on the world scale. In former Yugoslavia, the collapse of socialism and communist ideology also meant the disintegration of the federal state, war and the formation of new states in its territory. Thus, in the post-Yugoslav countries the recent processes, in addition to the shared difficulties of transition, involved also a radical change in the state framework. Along with the transformation of political and economic systems, various other issues had to be settled as well (by the force of arms and otherwise): borders, internal composition, and the identity of the new states and their societies, emerging from the wreck of the former Yugoslavia.

First of all, the state itself: Serbia is a part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, formed in 1992. More than any other SFRY successor state (apart from Bosnia-Herzegovina), the FRY has remained in a permanent condition of under-definition. Its borders have been drawn differently: although in terms of international law the borders of the new federal state have always and unambiguously coincided with the one-time republican borders of Serbia and Montenegro taken together, in other terms the shape of the FRY has not been so clear. Whether the FRY does or does not encompass Serb territories in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina (the so-called "Serb Krainas") has been understood differently at different points in time, according to different levels of construing the state (e.g. actual political, economic or cultural practice as opposed to official rhetoric), and by different political actors (e.g. nationalist as opposed to non-nationalist forces within Serbia and Montenegro; the regime vs. the opposition; political leadership in the "Krainas" vs. the official stands of the "mother country", etc.). With the definitive fall of the "Serb Kraina" in Croatia and the uneasy "entity" status of the Republika Srpska after Dayton, the idea of "all Serbs in one state" has become apparently illusory. Neverthe-less, the myth lingers on, perpetuated by more radically nationalist parties and public figures in Serbian political life, and subdued in - but not erased from - the collective consciousness of the people. The danger still exists that this misdirected longing for state unity of the entire Serbian people may be reactivated and abused again, with disastrous consequences similarly to those already brought on by the barely finished war.

In sum, the basic social institutions, though still formally existing, have had grave difficulties in performing their essential functions. As a perspicacious observer has put it: "Every day we have more and more `factories’ which manufacture nothing, `banks’ without money, `shops’ without customers or goods to sell, schools where no knowledge is acquired, courts without genuine judicial procedure, state agencies which do not perform normally the affairs of the state" (Bolcic, 1995b: 288).

In Serbia today, such external, controlling institutional regularity is absent. Circumstances are shifting constantly, mostly for the worse. The living conditions of the population are basically in the hands of an arbitrary, unaccountable, arcane power. Since the real-socialist practice of directing the totality of social life from one center has not been abandoned, the ruling groups may decide not only on national policies, but also on such things as the fate of particular enterprises, individual employment, wage levels, availability of supplies, content of the publicly owned media, book publishing policies, court decisions, quality of medical care, etc. What is more, the most important decisions, including the adoption of the basic laws, are made "backstage", in personalized fashion, by a handful of the most powerful personalities, and rarely brought into the open to be publicly discussed and evaluated.

For people in Serbia today, life itself has become an issue, something problematic rather than self-understood. This happened in the most direct sense during the war, when men were mobilized by force and sent to the front, although there was no combat on Serbia’s territory and Serbia was officially "not involved in the war". In somewhat more indirect ways, life is threatened by the consequences of the economic catastrophe and scarcity in all spheres. Whole categories of the population (be they formally employed or not) find it difficult to earn enough to live on; shortages of vital goods are frequent; and all that happens within a totally collapsed system of social security. The situation of some 500,000 refugees is particularly dismal. Thus the basic feature of everyday life here and now is insecurity, and the constantly emerging question for most people is: what will tomorrow bring?

In such a situation what remains of everyday life is only its residual part - mere survival. People continue to meet their most basic, vital needs, in one way or the other, depending on whatever the actual circumstances allow. But many old routines have lost their value, while new ones are not allowed to stabilize. Some age-old practical recipes, devices and "coping strategies" have been revived, which belonged to the scarcity of a poor agrarian society that Serbia once was, and which we thought to have overcome long ago (see Vujovic, 1995). The notion of the "life plan" has almost disappeared, since when the necessary information about the likelihood of relevant conditions in the future is lacking it is extremely difficult to assess the rationality of current investments and calculate their possible ratio to future outcomes. In sum, to use Bolcic’s succinct phrase, the everyday of the bulk of Serbia’s population is characterized by "accumulating various doings, initiated but never finished, both at the personal and social planes" (Bolcic, 1995b: 288).

Bearing in mind the nature of everyday life in today’s Serbia as objectively defined from outside its confines, the shaping and articulation of identities is constrained by a number of factors. There are three basic kinds of these barriers.

a) Because one must care about one’s very existence and survival, one lacks time and energy for making choices, for espousing various commitments, for discerning possible options for one’s identification and making one’s own peculiar hierarchy of these identifications. Threats to the vital core of people’s lives have disrupted the sense of normalcy (see Goffman, 1971; Weigert, 1981; Giddens, 1991). This routinized feeling of "as things are" or "as things usually go" sinks below the horizon of the immediate consciousness and becomes the basis taken-for-granted for everyday actions and thus opens space for other considerations. This has largely been lost. Perhaps people do not have time even to become aware that they have problems with identity, to bring this void clearly to their consciousness. A paradoxical situation arises in which professional thinkers - philosophers and social scientists - deplore the undermined identity of ordinary people much more than these identity-stripped subjects themselves.

b) Since the changing circumstances are more or less completely outside people’s personal control, people must continually adjust to them and follow wherever they point. An inevitable result is the loss of the notion of project which is indispensable for shaping identities. One cannot be quite sure as to who and what he/she is, if one does not know whether it will be possible to continue tomorrow any undertaking begun today. Vital needs press for radical changes in the once-projected life-course, rendering previous investments futile.

Let me illustrate this with a couple of realistic, albeit imaginary examples. Take, first, the case of a middle-aged metal worker whose factory, although not officially closed, stopped producing anything. He is on forced vacation, and earns a livelihood for himself and his family by selling smuggled goods at the flea-market. Another case is a recently graduated medical student. After twenty years of hard learning, she can find neither a post for specialization nor a job as a general practitioner. She lives in her parents’ apartment and gets a small monthly allowance from their miserable pensions. She may make some money by doing various odd jobs; or she may get married and become a housewife. A third case is a young refugee, a smart boy who has always done well in mathematics and planned to go to college. But he was forced to flee his native village with his mother and two siblings, leaving all their property behind. In Serbia, the family can barely make two ends meet. In order to survive the boy gets involved in criminal networks.

In all these examples, we may rightly ask: what happened to the respective identities of these people - that of a working-class member, a physician, or an upwardly mobile farmer’s son - when for years they have been prevented from realizing their former aspirations and enjoying the fruits of their earlier life investments?

True, as I have already said, the institutional failure and the symbolic confusion may be attributed partly to world-scale developments, to a great extent autonomous and uncontrollable. But only partly: more important for their genesis and perpetuation in Serbia has been the intentional conduct of the ruling regime. Its activity may, from this perspective, be described as deliberate prevention of the removal confusion and the introduction of some order, at both the "objective-material" and the "symbolic" levels. As to the first, most briefly put, the rulers have shown no willingness to undertake a radical transformation of the society, from which everything else would at least start to be reshaped. That would mark "a new beginning"; right now we have no "beginning", nothing is "beginning". What we have been living in is a protracted structural limbo. And in this respect, I think, Serbia differs from most East European countries. In terms of symbolic strategies, the impression is that the ruling groups willfully block the articulation of new meanings, new concepts and a new symbolic universe as a whole.

Be it as it may, we could assert that confusion, rather than overt repression, has been the regime’s strongest weapon in keeping the citizens docile and obedient, and precluding the articulation of a comprehensive and feasible socio-political alternative. The citizens themselves cannot be absolved of their own responsibility. Neither "the people", nor distinct social/political actors (parties, labor unions, NGOs), have proven very capable of grasping the situation adequately, in either intellectual or practical terms. For the most part they have, in one way or the other, agreed to be part of the show. The paradoxical "frantic apathy" of a tiresome everyday life has made people blind to the need for "cleaning up" the symbolic terrain. Regime-supported structural confusion has begun to appear as fateful, inescapable, almost God-given. Misnomers, unauthorized claims and outright lies have come to be viewed as a normal ingredient of social and political interaction. Previous identities collapsed together with the former country, its regime, ideology, and legitimating grounds, and can be held onto only with difficulty, while new ones are not being created to replace them. Thus we have a yawning gap between the absence of, and urgent need for, fresh identities at all levels, on the one hand, and on the other, incapacity and/or unwillingness to work on their construction.

Regardless of the stand one takes in the eternal dispute between "symbols" vs. "material reality", it is clear that symbolic work - with identity creation being its central part - is one of the first tasks of the democratic opposition in Serbia and an inevitable component of the effort at democratic transformation of the Serbian society.

1. In Serbian: "razoreno društvo". See, for instance, Lazic et al., 1994. Basically the same ideas are elaborated in: Bolcic (ed.), 1995.

3. This view is propounded by several political scientists. See for instance Goati, 1995.

4. Another destructive mechanism within the legal sphere has been aptly termed the "artificial criminalization of the society" by the Belgrade attorney-at-law and human rights activist, Biljana Kovacevic-vuco ("Protection of Human Rights in the fry", lecture delivered at the institute for philosophy and social theory, Belgrade, 5 nov. 1997). Some of the current legal regulations are such, she claims, that it is virtually impossible to live in this society without violating them. In this way the regime itself is turning its citizens into unwilling criminals. One consequence is that the very notion of law - one of the bases of any society - is undermined. Another consequence is a possibility for manipulation by the regime: although people are usually not prosecuted for these petty infractions, they may be activated at any time against some selected individuals, generally those politically or ethnically "undesirable".

5. See Mrkšic, 1994; Bolcic, 1995a.

6. Figures on the economic crisis and pauperization may be found in: Mrkšic, 1994; Vujovic, 1994; Pošarac, 1995.

7. "Forced vacations" or "mandatory leave", a specific feature of Serbia’s economy, refer to the phenomenon of people being sent away from their jobs, because their enterprises are unprofitable and there is not enough work to do, but without being fired. People on "forced vacations", which may last for years, receive some minimum allowance from the state, but not sufficient for survival. Most of them turn to business in the "second economy" to make their living.

8. See Mrkšic, 1994; Lazic, 1994a.

9. Heller (1978) offers one possible theoretical standpoint from which to consider the dependence of everyday practices on the historical concrete "totality" of the given society.

10. Rather than being a trait, or even a set of traits possessed by the individual, self-identity is "the self as reflexively understood by the person in terms of his or her biography", and consists most importantly "in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going" (Giddens, 1991: 53-54).

11. On the interplay between self and other for projecting and sustaining identities, see the works of Erving Goffman, especially Goffman, 1959.

12. Incidentally, this is perhaps the reason for a readily visible explosion of aggressive, vulgar visual symbols of "success", consisting of a set of symbolically low-key, unimaginative and uniform eternal markers that have come to be associated with "high life" (appearance, way of clothing, makeup, tools, paraphernalia, etc.). People increasingly use them, even those who do not feel personally close to that particular style. It is difficult to claim a high social status without assenting to this vulgar symbolic language.

13. I am here obviously equating "Serbia" as a society with "Serbs" as a nation. This is only for purposes of simplicity, and definitely does not mean that I deny or neglect the fact that a third of Serbia’s population consists of members of other nations and ethnic groups.

14. This has probably been the most salient difference in symbolic terms between Serbia and Croatia after the disintegration of SFRY. While the strongly ethnicized construction of Croatian society insistently bases itself on a nonnegotiable "zero point" marked by the "liberation war" (in Croatian invariably termed "domovinski rat", "the war for the fatherland") and the acquisition of independence. Serbia has not managed to find its equivalent. This has resulted in a comparative success of the Croatian solution to the identity problem, which might be speculated to have played a part in the ability of that society to survive and overcome the costs of the war - regardless of what one thinks about the quality of its democracy and the condition of human rights in Croatia. FR Yugoslavia, though "objectively" spared the destruction of war and thus enjoying a better starting position, has "subjectively" forsaken the opportunity and, in the end, fared much worse.

15. Here the ruling groups may appear as a sort of "privileged actor," the only collective subject within the society that is capable of rational and planned action. However, whether they themselves are caught in the overall confusion or not must remain an open question, requiring "inside" research of these groups, which is hardly feasible in the given conditions.