Revisiting the discourse of Third Serbia: Us vs. Them deconstructed or recomposed?

Abstract

The discourse of “two Serbias” is centred around the two (imagined) political and ideological standpoints and their carrier groups into which the Serbian public sphere has long been divided, at least according to the received interpretation. Throughout the 1990s and the beginning of the 21st century, First Serbia was seen as nationalist, authoritarian and primitive and its Other as civic, cosmopolitan and cultivated. Hence, to talk about “Two Serbias”, more often than not, was to criticize one or to defend the other. At one point in time, a new discourse emerged, articulated as an explicit call to overcome symbolic conflicts and cleavages in society and dismiss the binary itself – a position that may be called “Third Serbia”. The advocates of Third Serbia (coming from quite distant positions on the political spectrum) criticized the established division as artificial, unproductive, elitist and detached from the genuine concerns and interests of Serbian society. In late 2012, we published an article exploring the varieties of this discourse. We sought to examine the strategies of constructing Third Serbia and the arguments justifying it, as well as their possible implications. Ten years later, we will revisit the figure of “Third Serbia”, the discourse that followed it, as well as our previous observations and interpretations. We will try to reconstruct this discourse as it has unfolded in the public arena during the past decade, detect if new varieties appeared, identify its proponents (both old and new) and their ideological backbone while keeping historical and socio-political contexts in check.