Aleksandar Pavković. Critical Discourse Studies. Volume 14, Issue 5, 2017.
The ascent to power—and fame—of Slobodan Milošević (1941-2006), a former president of Serbia and of post-communist Yugoslavia (Serbia/Montenegro), is often presented as a testament to the power of nationalist discourse, which he revived initially within a mono-party Communist system (Cohen, 2001, pp. 79-82; Thomas, 1999, pp. 48-51). The rise to power in late 1999 of Vladimir Putin (1952-) the current president of the Russian Federation, is not linked to the revival of traditional Russian national discourse (Hill & Gaddy, 2013). Yet recently, in his public speeches and interviews, Putin has deployed a range of nationalist narratives, primarily in the context of the political changes to and on the borders of the Russian Federation. A recent study of Russian and Serbian nationalism by Vujačić (2015), outstanding in its scope and depth, offers a rare insight into the nationalist discourses of the two leaders as well as the historical and political context in which these have been deployed. This essay is also a study of the nationalist discourses of the two leaders but, unlike the Vujačić study, it examines only a limited set of the themes and arguments presented in their public speeches. Unlike Vujačić’s study, the present essay focuses on the discursive techniques and rhetoric of these speeches and leaves their political context as well as the historical sources of the doctrines which they express, largely unexplored. The study of the rhetorical devices and thematic content of their speeches may offer some insight into the nationalist ideologies which they or at least their target audiences espouse (or espoused in the past) and into the belief systems within which they operate(d).
The essay will utilise the analytical framework and instruments for the analysis of nationalist discourses developed by the Vienna School of Critical Discourse Analysis as elaborated and applied in Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl, & Liebhart, 2009. According to Wodak et al. (2009, p. 33) macro-strategies employed in the discursive formation of national identity can be generally classified as construction, perpetuation or justification, transformation and demontage or dismantling. These strategies use a variety of topoi or argumentation schemes such as that of the lovely, idyllic place (locus amoenus), of contrastive comparison (locus amoenus versus locus terribilis), of threat, of definition (‘democracy’), of history as a teacher, of disaster (pp. 36-42). In addition to strategies and related topoi, Wodak et al. classify the thematic content of the speeches into various thematic blocks—such as the concept and definition of the (Austrian) nation, its origins, the purported impact of the past, homo Austriacus (the national character stereotyped). Their list of topoi does not include a scheme of argumentation which, following Anthony D. Smith, one can call ‘sacralisation’. This is a procedure of proclaiming something, commonly territory or group or both, sacred to a group and its members. This topos, as deployed in the speeches of Milošević and Putin, is the focus of the present essay.
In his studies of the sacralisation of territory, Smith ([1999] 1997, 1999) distinguishes: first, the sacralisation in which a particular religion (e.g. Judaism) proclaims a people and thus its habitat ‘holy’; second, the sacralisation through the holy deeds of heroic ancestors; and, third, the sacralisation of the new territory which offers liberty to the new settlers fleeing oppression in their previous land (Smith, 1999, pp. 19-21). In this essay, we explore a sample of modern nationalist discourses exemplifying the second type of sacralisation: the holy or glorious deeds of ancestors sacralise the territory on which they were performed; these deeds may be religious (e.g. religious conversion) as well as martial ones (on the battlefield or elsewhere). But as Smith’s example of the first type of sacralisation testifies, the sacralisation of land obviously pre-dates the rise of modern nationalism and associated national identities.
Contested lands: the context of sacralisation
As we shall see, in their speeches Milošević and Putin sacralise the two territories—Kosovo and Crimea respectively—which at the time of sacralisation had been contested. Their authority (if any) to sacralise land arises from the nature and role of their high political office. At the time of the speeches Milošević first held the office of the president of the presidency of the League of Communists (Communist party) of Serbia and then, from 1989 to 1991, the office of the president of the presidency of the Socialist Republic of Serbia, a federal unit in the Communist-ruled Yugoslavia. These were the highest ranking offices, respectively, in the Communist Party and in the state apparatus of Serbia. At the time of his speeches, Putin was the president of the Russian Federation, the highest ranking and most powerful office of the state. As Wodak et al. (2009, p. 72) suggest, the president of the Austrian state is a ‘national ‘preacher’ and a kind of voice of the nation [and is] expected to address moral issues deemed important to the state in a solemn, dignified manner on relevant occasions’. Milošević and Putin, in the speeches to be examined, take upon exactly this role of the ‘supreme national preachers of the state’ (Wodak et al., 2009, p. 93). It is in this role that they proclaim the contested territories sacred to the nation they represent. The topos of sacralisation is here part of a micro-strategy of a national appropriation of a contested land: Kosovo and Crimea are sacralised as a (symbolic) proof of the ‘national possession’ of these lands.
But why claim ‘national possession’ of Kosovo in the late 1980s, when Kosovo was still a province of Serbia, one of the six federal units in the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY)? There were two related reasons. First, since 1974 the province’s assembly had the right of veto over any legislative proposals of Serbia’s assembly; even earlier than that, the highest positions in the Communist party organisation of Kosovo were taken over by Kosovo Albanian cadres (Kosovo Albanians were a majority population in the province). This meant that the Communist Party of Serbia no longer had control over the Communist party and government in its province. Second, following the suppression in 1981, by the Yugoslav federal army, of the popular uprising of Kosovo Albanians demanding the separation of Kosovo from Serbia (Biberaj, 1994, p. 124), both the support for the underground secessionist movement among Kosovo Albanians (Kubo, 2011, pp. 1139-1142) and the mass emigration of Serbs and other non-Albanians from Kosovo significantly increased. The Yugoslav Communist Party proved unable to suppress the Albanian secessionist movement and to end the emigration of the Serbs. From 1986 onwards Kosovo Serbs staged a series of public protests in Kosovo and Belgrade against violence and intimidation by Kosovo Albanians, (Vladisavljević, 2008, pp. 86-99). Among influential Serbian intellectuals this was taken to indicate that the remaining Serbs in Kosovo were exposed to an ‘aggression’ and that, in a sense, Serbia was in danger of ‘losing’ Kosovo (Dragović-Soso, 2002, pp. 133-145; Thomas, 1999, pp. 40-42). It was at one such public protest, in April 1987, that Slobodan Milošević, the highest ranking Communist official in Serbia, told the protesting Serbs that Kosovo is their home to which they were bound by the spirit of their ancestors and thus in effect started a mass campaign for the ‘reintegration’ of Kosovo into Serbia.
Unlike Kosovo which was at the time of Milošević’s ‘sacralisation’ speeches part of Serbia, in 2014 Crimea was not part of Russia but of Ukraine. It was incorporated into the Russian empire in 1784 and, within its Communist-ruled successor state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) it became part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist republic, one of the 15 federal units of the USSR. In 1954 the Communist leaders of the USSR transferred Crimea from the Russian to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic; in 1954, as well as in 2014, the majority population in Crimea were Russians. In August 1991, the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet proclaimed the independence of Ukraine and changed its name to the Republic of Ukraine. Upon the mutually agreed dissolution of the USSR in December 1991, the Russian Federation recognised the independence of Ukraine and in 1994 its president Boris Yeltsin signed the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances which committed the Russian Federation ‘ … to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine’ (UN, 1994). In 1992-1993 Yeltsin’s recognition of the status of Crimea as a part of Ukraine was challenged by a variety of parties in the Russian parliament as well as separatist political groups in Crimea itself (Solchanyk, 1995, pp. 8-9). However, Yeltsin’s chosen successor as president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, did not, publicly at least, challenge this policy from his accession to power in 2000 until the violent overthrow of the Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovich during the ‘Maidan revolution’ in Kiev in February 2014. Yanukovich’s pro-Russian regime was replaced by a regime supported by anti-Russian far right organisations—which were in the forefront of the violent confrontations at Maidan square in Kiev since November 2013—as well as by the US and the EU governments. The overthrow of the Yanukovich regime and its replacement found little support in the regions inhabited by ethnic Russians such as Crimea and Donbas, in which his Party of the Regions had most support (Sakwa, 2015, p. 341). In view of the anti-Russian orientation of the far-right militant supporters of the new regime and the US administration’s support of the violent regime change, this regime change was regarded, by Putin and members of the Russian political and intellectual elite, as not only a threat to ethnic Russian residents in Crimea and to Russia’s naval base in Crimea but also to Russia’s overall security (Sakwa, 2015, pp. 252, 280-285, 334). It was in response to those threats that Putin claimed ‘national possession’ of Crimea for Russia as a justification of its transfer from Ukraine back to Russia.
Apart from those, Milošević and Putin also identified a common threat that both national groups, the Serbs and the Russians, faced in the period from 1989 to 2000—that of state disintegration resulting in the dispersal of these two large national groups into several states, in which they became involuntary or ‘trapped’ minorities. Already in his annual presidential address in 2005 Putin introduced the theme of the involuntary dispersal of the Russian nation: following the collapse of the USSR, he said, ‘[t]ens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory … ’ (Putin, 2005). This was further elaborated in his televised speech to the Russian ruling elite, on 18 March 2014 (the ‘Crimea speech’):
… Millions of people went to bed in one country and awoke in different ones, overnight becoming ethnic minorities in former Union republics, while the Russian nation became one of the biggest, if not the biggest ethnic group in the world to be divided by borders. [emphasis added]. (Putin, 2014)
Milošević’s speeches from 1989 until his overthrow in 2000 display a similar theme in which the Serb nation is portrayed as the biggest loser out of the (then potential) disintegration of their common state, Yugoslavia. In a public conversation with Belgrade University students and professors Milošević pointed out that if the existing federal republics were to become independent states within their existing borders around 3 million Serbs would be left outside their own state and that ‘no other people [‘narod’] would have been divided to such an extent as the Serbs’ (Milošević, 2001, p. 55 [23.03.1991]) And in a number of his speeches from 1990 onwards, he spoke of the readiness of the Serbs (and of Serbia and his government) to resist by arms any attempt to disperse the Serb nation among the newly emergent states. In a speech in 2000, he branded the break-up of the multinational states of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, ‘a civilisational degradation of these societies’ which led to the wars in the Soviet Union and in Yugoslavia (Milošević, 2008, p. 231).
The common thematic framework is that of national victimhood within which each leader assigns to his respective nation the title of ‘the greatest victim’: for Putin the Russians are the most divided nation in the world and for Milošević the Serbs are the most divided nation among the constituent nations of SFR Yugoslavia.
One could argue that the topos of sacralisation—in particular of sacralisation of territory—is deployed as part of a complex ‘strategy of defence’ (Wodak et al., 2009, p. 40), in this case the defence against the involuntary dispersal of the nation and/or the loss of the nation’s territory. The involuntary dispersal here forms a part of the disaster topos as well as the topos of threat: this event was portrayed as a disaster which threatened the unity of the dispersed national groups.
Sacralisation and national identity
A religious sacralisation of Kosovo—and of Crimea?
On 28 June 1389, on St. Vitus Day (Vidovdan), Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović, the leader of the Serb Christian forces, died a martyr’s death on the Kosovo Plain (or the Field of Blackbirds) resisting the invasion of his domain by the Islamic Ottoman army. His body was first buried in the Serb Orthodox cathedral church in Prishtina (the present-day capital of Kosovo) and then in 1391 transferred to his foundation monastery at Ravanica (in present-day Serbia). At this time he was canonised as a saint in the Serbian Orthodox Church (Mihaljčić, 1989, p. 153). His martyr’s death—and the death of the Serb nobility/martyrs on the Kosovo Plain—is commemorated both in the Serbian Orthodox liturgy and in a cycle of folk oral epics dealing with the Kosovo Battle (Duijzings, 2000, pp. 176-180). His martyrdom and canonisation appears to have sacralised the Kosovo Plain and the place of his first burial as well as the wider region over which he ruled (Zlatanov, 2001, pp. 4-8). The religious sacralisation of present-day Kosovo appears to follow Smith’s second type of sacralisation: the holy deeds of the ancestors sacralise the land on which they lived and died.
In contrast to Prince Lazar, Grand Prince Vladimir I (Volodymir in Ukrainian) of Kiev achieved sainthood through his Christian baptism in 988 and his conversion to Christianity of his subjects, the people of Kievan Rus’—who were much later identified as Russians as well as Ukrainians and Byelorussians. According to one set of sources (Fennell, 2013, p. 37), his baptism took place in the Greek city of Cherson (Korsun in old Slavic) on the shores of Crimea which, prior to his baptism, he conquered from the Byzantines. Wherever he was baptised himself, the conversion of his subjects started, in 989, far from Crimea, in Kiev (where he was later buried). There he was also canonised as a saint—two centuries later, probably in 1284 (Fennell, 1993, p. 81); by then, Korsun, open to the Mongol raids, was outside the sphere of the Kievan Rus state, fragmented as it was into several warring principalities (Magosci, 2010, p. 86). How his canonisation in 1284 then sacralised the (alleged) place of his own baptism—Korsun—is perhaps an open question.
Be that as it may, Vladimir Putin, in 2014, extended the sacredness of Korsun to the whole of Crimea as the site of the ‘holy deed’ of the baptism of Prince Vladimir, who is, in his story as well as in Russian religious literature, portrayed as a founder of the spiritual unity of East Slavic peoples, Russians, Ukrainians and Byelorussians.
Milošević’s sacralisation of Kosovo
Milošević’s first public act of appropriation of Kosovo for the Serbs, in an unprepared speech in April 1987, appeals not to the Kosovo Battle and its martyrs but to their ancestral possession of the land and its link to their national virtues or qualities—resilience and bravery. At the time of this speech, Milošević was on an official visit to Communist party organisation in Kosovo. During his meeting with Kosovo Communist Party officials (who were ethnic Albanians) a large number of Serb inhabitants of Kosovo gathered in front of the building in which the meeting was taking place protesting against the alleged violence and intimidation against the Serbs (who were a minority population in the province). As the police moved to disperse the protesting Serbs, there were numerous shouts in Serbian ‘They are beating us’. Milošević came out of the building and said to the crowd ‘No one should be allowed to beat you’. Following the incident—broadcast the next day throughout the media in Serbia and in Yugoslavia—he invited a large number of Serb and Montenegrin protesters to a meeting at which he listened, almost the whole night, to their complaints, primarily about the violence and intimidation to which they were subjected by Kosovo Albanians. The next day at dawn he delivered a long, unprepared speech in which he in effect claimed ‘national possession’ of Kosovo for the Serbs (Cohen, 2001, pp. 62-64).
The speech itself was using the standard—if at the time already outdated—Yugoslav Communist Party terminology of the ‘brotherhood and unity of the peoples of Yugoslavia’. The phrase itself was used five times, whereas ‘Yugoslavia’ was mentioned 16 times, more frequently than either ‘Serbia’ or ‘Kosovo’ on its own. The main point of the speech was to assure the Serbs and Montenegrins, who were at the time its primary audience, that they and their land in Kosovo are protected by the Yugoslav Communist Party; and among the slogans with which he ended the speech were ‘The whole of Yugoslavia is with you’ (meaning the Serbs and Montenegrins of Kosovo) as well as ‘Yugoslavia cannot exist without Kosovo’.
The speech, overall, displays two complementary strategies: of unification and of defence. The unification strategy uses the lexemes and phrases denoting unity—such as ‘brotherhood and unity’, ‘working together’ and ‘whole of Yugoslavia … ’. The defence strategy employs extensively the topos of threat; the lexical instruments of this topos include the lexemes of open hostility such as ‘enemies’, ‘separatists’ ‘counterrevolutionaries’.
The appropriation/sacralisation of the land is deployed within the strategy of defence, in this case the defence of two related national groups, the Serbs and Montenegrins, whose members had been leaving Kosovo in large numbers:
What I want to say to you first, comrades, is that you should stay here [in Kosovo], because this is your land, here are your houses, fields and gardens, your memories. You are not going to leave your land just because life has become difficult, because you are suffering from injustice and humiliation. It was never in the spirit of the Serbian and Montenegrin people to withdraw in the face of difficulties … to become demoralised when the situation is hard. You should stay here both because of your ancestors and your heirs. Otherwise, your ancestors would be ashamed, your heirs disappointed [emphasis added] (Milošević, 1987).
The appropriation is carried out by using personal pronouns ‘you’ and ‘yours’ (indicating possession) and spatial (‘the land, houses, fields and gardens’), mental (‘memories’, ‘spirit’, ‘ashamed’) and temporal (‘ancestors’ ‘heirs’) lexemes. Such a wide scope of lexemes suggests that appropriation of land here is extended to the symbolic realm of belonging: in virtue of their memories of their and their ancestors’ past in Kosovo, and, more importantly, in virtue of the spirit of the ancestors who lived there, the Serbs and Montenegrins belong to this land.
The ancestral spirit of the Serbs and Montenegrins makes them, according to Milošević, brave any hardship and to persevere in face of it: thus two ancestral spiritual qualities, resilience and bravery, make the land which they possess sacred to the Serbs and Montenegrins (and not, necessarily, Kosovo Albanians, who are not mentioned in this context). The land is further sacralised by the putative shame that the ancestors would have felt (metaphorically, of course) if the land were to be abandoned by their current heirs. Why would the ancestors be ashamed? Resilience and bravery are presented here as specific qualities of Serbs and Montenegrins: these are elements constructive of their national identity. Therefore, those who abandon their ancestral land of Kosovo lose perhaps the most important elements of their national identity, something that would indeed cause their ancestors to be ashamed. Staying on the land of one’s ancestors is equivalent to staying true to one’s national identity. In this way, this particular construction of national identity of these two groups is brought in to sacralise the land on which they live.
Milošević’s unprepared but widely broadcast response ‘No one is allowed to beat you’, as well as his gloss on the resilience and bravery of Serbs and Montenegrins and the putative shame of their ancestors—both without precedent in the Yugoslav Communist rhetoric—came to be viewed, among many Serbs both in Serbia and other republics of Yugoslavia, as an indication of his resolve to defend the Serbs in Kosovo (and, later, in other parts of Yugoslavia) which no other Communist politicians had shown before. Following a series of carefully staged and televised Party meetings and public rallies, by the end of 1988 Milošević was elevated, in the view of this constituency, to the position of their national leader—and in his new role became in the words of Wodak et al. ‘the supreme national preacher’ (Thomas, 1999, p. 47; Vladisavljević, 2008, pp. 154-155).
Two years later, on St. Vitus Day of 1989 at a huge public rally marking the 600th Anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo on the Kosovo Plain in his new role Milošević linked ancestral (Serb) bravery and resilience to its putative origins in the Battle of Kosovo:
The Kosovo heroism has been inspiring our creativity for 6 centuries, and has been feeding our pride and does not allow us to forget that at one time we were an army great, brave, and proud, one of the few that remained unvanquished even in defeat. … now, we are being again engaged in battles and are facing battles. They are not armed battles, although such things cannot be excluded yet … but they cannot be won without resolve, bravery, and sacrifice, without the noble qualities that were present here in the field of Kosovo in the past [emphasis added]. (Milošević, 1989)
And in the final lines of his speech he declared:
Let the memory of Kosovo heroism live forever!
The number of lexemes with positive connotation, referring to mental dispositions/spiritual qualities has now increased: there is ‘resolve’, ‘bravery’ and ‘sacrifice’ as well as ‘heroism’ (the latter repeated three times in the speech); and these are related to the group addressed, the Serbs, by the personal pronoun ‘we’ and its derivative ‘our’. Already in the second sentence of the speech, the Serb ancestors from the battle of Kosovo are brought onto the stage in the form of the legendary Kosovo hero Miloš Obilić as a metaphorical presentation of Serb heroism and sacrifice. In the Kosovo battle legend the Serbian noble Miloš Obilić sacrifices his life by assassinating the Ottoman sultan on the field of Kosovo. In the oral folk poetry of the battle and in the popular legend, every Serb has to account (metaphorically) to Obilić as to how he (commonly not she) lives up to his example of heroism and sacrifice. Within the framework of the Kosovo battle legend, the Serbs are expected to display the ancestral qualities of heroism as displayed at Kosovo. In regards to this, Milošević has no doubts:
… [I]t is not difficult for us to answer today the old question: how are we going to face Miloš [Obilić]? … [I]t seems as if Serbia has, precisely in this year, in 1989, regained its state and its dignity.
‘Serbia’ here functions metonymically for the contemporary Serbs who showed the required heroism and sacrifice by regaining their state and dignity.
The ancestral spiritual qualities classified now as ‘heroism’ are sourced back to the battle in 1389 and are attributed to contemporary Serbs who are then told that they will need those qualities for the future battles that they are facing. It is the heroism and sacrifice of the Serbs, displayed at the Kosovo battle in 1389 and providing inspiration to them ever since, that sacralise Kosovo; this is a case of sacralisation by deed (or rather deeds).
The dominant strategy of the speech is that of unification; the strategy is carried out by using a variety of lexemes referring to unity/harmony (9 occurrences) and to disunity (16 occurrences); the former are linked with the lexemes referring to dignity (positive) and the latter to those referring to betrayal (negative). The dominating topos deployed in the speech is that of history as a teacher. History, including the battle of Kosovo, teaches that disunity brings disaster to the Serbs and the recovery of their unity brings a recovery of dignity. The ‘renewed unity’ of Serbia which brought back dignity to the Serbs (cf Milošević’s answer to the ‘Obilić question’) is an obvious reference to the amendments to the Constitution of the federal unit of Serbia, which Milošević’s government carried out in March 1989; these amendments severely curtailed the political and legal autonomy of the province of Kosovo, thus ‘re-integrating’ Kosovo with Serbia (Vladisavljević, 2008, pp. 192-194).
In addition to past bravery and resilience or, in general, heroism, in 1988, Milošević deployed a putative ‘national’ emotion:
Kosovo is the very centre of [Serbia’s] history, its culture, and its memory. All people have a love which burns in their hearts forever. For a Serb, that love is Kosovo. That is why Kosovo will remain in Serbia. Not at the expense of Albanians … [emphasis added]. (Milošević, 1988)
It is the emotion of love that makes its object, the land of Kosovo, sacred to the Serbs. According to this rhetoric, the chosen people—the Serbs—at this moment are not choosing to love Kosovo; their love for Kosovo, like their ancestors’ bravery and resilience, is the inevitable outcome of Serb history, a kind of destiny, and not a matter of choice. In this way, the love of Kosovo becomes another defining element of Serb national identity. The identity construction strategy in this speech deploys another form of the sacralisation topos—the sacralisation of land through ‘national’ love.
Of course, love in this speech is a metaphorical emotion, not a felt one—a metaphor for a strong emotional attachment and/or appropriation. Another metaphor, related to that of love, is that of the heart as a place both for love and for its object: as an object of love, Kosovo, the land—again metaphorically—resides in the hearts of the Serbs. The heart as a place where sacred objects reside—particularly lands or sites—is a favourite metaphor of national anthems and patriotic verse and, as we shall see, this metaphor reappears in Putin’s sacralisation of Crimea.
The above passage on love occurs in a relatively brief speech which Milošević, in his role as national leader of the Serbs, delivered in November 1988 at a huge public rally in the capital Belgrade. Billed as the ‘Kosovo Brotherhood and Solidarity Rally’ it crowned a series of large public rallies in solidarity with the Serbs in Kosovo organised (and televised) throughout Serbia and Montenegro during 1988 (Vladisavljević, 2008, pp. 146-157).
Like his 1987 speech, this speech also frequently refers to Yugoslavia, Yugoslav peoples and their ‘unity and brotherhood’. But unlike his 1987 speech and his later speeches, in this one Milošević praises ‘Tito’s Yugoslavia’ which was created in a ‘magnificent revolution’ by the Yugoslav communists, working class and Yugoslav peoples and then appeals to all Yugoslav peoples not to let that Yugoslavia die ‘at a conference table as its enemies hope’ (Milošević, 1988). Thus ‘Tito’s Yugoslavia’ and Tito himself could (should) not be blamed for the difficulties that Serbs and other non-Albanians now face living in Kosovo.
The three excerpts discussed above are self-congratulatory, aiming to flatter the target audience and its national pride: the speaker is congratulating the members of the chosen nation—including himself—for their flattering national characteristics, including the putatively altruistic love of the land of Kosovo as well as the recovery of (Serb) unity in 1989. But the three speeches from which the above excerpts originate are also mobilising and exhortative: they aim to gather wider public support for Milošević’s policy of ‘reintegrating’ the province of Kosovo into Serbia resulting in the constitutional amendments of March 1989.
All three speeches emphasise—in fact, extol—the plurinational structure of Serbia’s population and assure Albanians of their place in Kosovo and Serbia: ‘I can tell the Albanians in Kosovo that nobody has ever found it difficult to live in Serbia because he is not Serbian. Serbia has always been open to everybody … ’ (Milošević, 1988) and ‘Serbia has never had only Serbs living in it. Today, more than in the past, members of other peoples and nationalities also live in it … . (Milošević, 1989), This topos of the ‘official’ recognition of and welcome to other nations in addition to the chosen/preferred one is found in Putin’s speeches too.
But conspicuously missing in these three and Milošević’s other public speeches is any reference to religious sacralisation or religious symbolism: there is no reference to Saint Lazar or his martyrdom. Even the leading critic of Serb nationalism, Čolović (2012), in his detailed analysis of the 1989 Kosovo Plain (St. Vitus Day) speech, could find no plausible explanation for its total absence of religious symbolism. In contrast, Putin, as we shall see in the next section, in his strategy of identity construction focuses on the religious sacralisation of Crimea. Perhaps this is not too difficult to explain: Milošević, throughout his career, retained his Communist atheist stance in public (and private) life, while Putin’s adherence to Russian Orthodoxy, including his association with prominent Russian Orthodox clergy, is widely publicised (Hill & Gaddy, 2013, p. 68).
Putin’s sacralisation of Crimea
At the very beginning of his ‘Crimea speech’ of 18 March 2014, following a brief but triumphant reference to the referendum in March 2014 in which the inhabitants of Crimea voted to re-join Russia, Putin sacralises Crimea as the land of Prince Vladimir’s baptism:
This is the location of ancient Khersones, where Prince Vladimir was baptised. His spiritual feat of adopting Orthodoxy predetermined the overall basis of the culture, civilisation and human values that unite the peoples of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. (Putin, 2014)
And, following this brief religious/spiritual sacralisation, he proceeds to sacralise Crimea as the land of Russian bravery or military valour displayed on its battlefields (see below).
In his presidential address in December 2014, the religious sacralisation of Crimea is now related not only to the ‘culture, civilisation and human values’ mentioned in the ‘Crimea Speech’, but also to Russian national unity/identity:
It was in Crimea, in the ancient city of Chersonesus or Korsun, as ancient Russian chroniclers called it, that Grand Prince Vladimir was baptised before bringing Christianity to Rus.
In addition to ethnic similarity, a common language, common elements of their material culture, a common territory, even though its borders were not marked then, and a nascent common economy and government, Christianity was a powerful spiritual unifying force that helped involve various tribes and tribal unions of the vast Eastern Slavic world in the creation of a Russian nation [русской нации] and centralized Russian [Российского] state. It was thanks to this spiritual unity that our forefathers for the first time and forevermore saw themselves as a united nation. All of this allows us to say that Crimea, the ancient Korsun or Chersonesus, and Sevastopol have invaluable civilisational and even sacral importance for Russia, like the Temple Mount in Jerusalem for the followers of Islam and Judaism [emphasis added]. (Putin, 2014b)
Putin’s sacralisation argument (topos) here appears to have the following structure: (1) Korsun, a city in Crimea, is the sacred locus of Vladimir’s baptism; therefore, by extension, Crimea is the sacred locus linked to the conversion to Christianity of his subjects (2). The baptism of Prince Vladimir leads to the conversion to Christianity of his people; this leads to the adoption of Christianity by various East Slavic tribes/tribal unions which, in turn, leads to the ‘spiritual unity’ of the Russian nation; and this leads to the ‘national unity’ of the same nation. From (1) and (2) follows (3) that Crimea is the sacred locus/source of the religious, spiritual and national unity of Russians. Finally, the argument ends with an analogy: proclaiming that the central religious—‘sacral’—significance of Crimea to Russians is analogous to the significance of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem to adherents of other religions. Apparently, the aim of the analogy is to emphasise the importance of Crimea to Russians.
But, similar to Milošević’s topos of sacralisation, the land of Crimea is also sacralised as the site of notable displays of the bravery and valour which define Russian national identity:
The graves of Russian [русски] soldiers whose bravery brought Crimea into the Russian [Российскую] state are also in Crimea. This is also Sevastopol—a legendary city with an outstanding history, a fortress that serves as the birthplace of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. Crimea is Balaklava and Kerch, Malakhov Kurgan and Sapun Ridge. Each one of these places is dear to our hearts, symbolising Russian [русской] military glory and outstanding valour. (Putin, 2014)
Like the bravery of the Serbs in the Kosovo Battle, the bravery displayed here is of the military kind, in the battle against enemies. But unlike the valour displayed in a single battle in 1389, in Crimea military valour has been displayed in numerous battles: both the battles for the incorporation of Crimea into the Russian state (empire) and the battles fought against invaders of Russia and of Crimea. And as in the case of Kosovo, the memory of the bravery makes the land itself ‘dear to our hearts’. Making it ‘dear to our [Russian] hearts’ makes it part of the identity of every Russian.
Sacralisation of the land through bravery is, as in the case of Kosovo, an abbreviated form of an identification topos which forms a part of the macro-strategy of national identity construction: through past bravery, placed ‘in the hearts’ of subsequent generations, the land becomes part of individual/national identity.
Being Russian—that is, having a Russian national identity—involves a specific belief/emotion which places Crimea in Russia:
In people’s hearts and minds, Crimea has always been an inseparable part of Russia. This firm conviction is based on truth and justice and was passed from generation to generation, over time … (Putin, 2014)
Crimea enters the ‘hearts and minds’ of Russians through ‘a firm conviction’. This state of mind appears to be cognitive—‘based on truth and justice’—but since it is also placed in Russians’ ‘hearts’, it is not just any cognitive attitude based on truth and justice. Any state of mind that is also a state of heart, one could argue, is an affective state, an emotion. If so, the conviction that Crimea is part of Russia, thus placed in the ‘hearts and minds’, is a belief backed by an undefined emotion.
In contrast to Milošević, Putin is not prepared to say that Crimea is an object of love for all Russians. However, just as Milošević sacralised Kosovo through love, this is also a case of sacralisation through mental internalisation: the land becomes a sacred object as an object of a belief/emotion (‘hearts and minds’) defining the identity of the nation. The identity, incorporating this Crimean belief, is here regarded as trans-generational, belonging to the present and previous generations—perhaps stretching back to the misty past of the conversion to Christianity?
As in the case of Kosovo, the sacralisation of the land here establishes a ‘national entitlement’ to a piece of land, but this national entitlement does not exclude members of other nations from residing in it as in a home of their own. Like Milošević, Putin extols the plurinationality of Crimea and of Russia: both have been, from the earliest times, a home to peoples/nations other than Russians. Their distinct ethnicity and language have been respected in the past—and, according to Putin, will be respected in the future (Putin, 2014a). This is the topos of the official recognition of other nations which Milošević had repeatedly used as well.
In contrast to Milošević’s Kosovo speeches, Putin’s two speeches (as well as further clarifications in the Direct Line with Putin television broadcast in April 2014) are primarily justificatory but not exhortative nor even mobilisational: they offer elaborate and diverse justifications for an already implemented governmental policy—the incorporation of Crimea and Sevastopol as a new subject of the Russian Federation. Among the justificatory arguments, in his ‘Crimea speech’ Putin first deploys the will of the people (as allegedly shown in the referendum in Crimea) and then, immediately following the ‘hearts and minds’ passage discussed above, he advances the following rather elaborate argument from the rectification of historical injustices:
After the revolution, the Bolsheviks, for a number of reasons—may God judge them—added large sections of the historical South of Russia to the Republic of Ukraine. … Then, in 1954, a decision was made to transfer the Crimean Region to Ukraine, along with Sevastopol … This was the personal initiative of the Communist Party head Nikita Khrushchev … .
What matters now is that this decision was made in clear violation of the constitutional norms that were in place even then. The decision was made behind the scenes. Naturally, in a totalitarian state nobody bothered to ask the citizens of Crimea and Sevastopol. They were faced with the fact … But on the whole … this decision was treated as a formality of sorts because the territory was transferred within the boundaries of a single state. Back then, it was impossible to imagine that Ukraine and Russia may split up and become two separate states. However, this has happened […] It was only when Crimea ended up as part of a different country that Russia realised that it was not simply robbed, it was plundered. (Putin, 2014)
The transfer of Crimea in 1954 to the then union republic of Ukraine in the USSR is here categorised as a crime, ‘plunder’. The perpetrators of this crime, the Bolsheviks and in particular Khrushchev, did not necessarily intend to harm (‘rob and plunder’) Russia, partly because the transfer of Crimea to Ukraine was still effected within one state, the USSR. In any case, Putin withholds his judgment on the perpetrators, leaving it to God. But regardless of the question of plunder, the (alleged) injustice committed in 1954 was multi-faceted because the transfer of Crimea (1) breached the constitutional norms of the USSR (2) was done behind the scenes and (3) the residents of Crimea were not asked.
This argument from the rectification of injustices appears to follow the topos of a contrastive comparison between the acts of 1954 (unjust) and the acts of 2014 (just): in contrast to 1954, in 2014 (1) this act of transfer did not breach the constitutional norms of the Russian Federation; (2) the transfer was (allegedly) not carried out behind the scenes (3) the residents of Crimea were (allegedly) asked to vote on the latest transfer. There is no parallel to a rectification of injustice argument of this kind in Milošević’s three speeches discussed above. After all, the Yugoslav Communist ruler, Tito—whom Milošević appears to praise in his 1988 speech—did not remove Kosovo from Serbia and thus ‘rob’ Serbia of its sacred land.
Of course, Crimea would have maintained its sacred character, at least for Putin, even if there were no earlier injustices that now needed to be rectified. The rectification of injustices in this context forms an additional strategy of justification of the transfer of this territory, complementary to that of sacralisation. In fact, the rectification of (internal) injustices is only one among several political and legal arguments which in his Crimea speech of March 2014 Putin deploys in order to justify the transfer of Crimea to Russia. Although it only takes up a minor part both of his Crimea speech in March and his Presidential Address in December 2014, the sacralisation of Crimea is the topos deployed at the very beginning of each speech, thus providing a general—and perhaps grounding—framework for other justificatory arguments.
Why sacralise the land?
Sacralisation of land is usually a strategy of de-contestation: a land, which is contested among two or more groups/states, is proclaimed sacred to one group; the sacred object then becomes mentally internalised by its members as a defining element of the group’s identity. Through the sacralisation any contestation over the land is transformed into a contest over the identity of a group (or groups)—and in this contest the group in question or its representatives are expected to have the final word. If so, the de-contestation of the land through its sacralisation is an instrument for enabling the chosen group (to whom the land is sacred) to refuse to address the political question as to who should control the land. This makes it a favourite instrument for a particular type of de-contestation—a de-contestation which attempts to depoliticise the contest over territory. Since the territory is sacred to one group, no political argument as to who should, in fact, control the territory can, within this kind of nationalist discourse, be decisive: inter-state treaties or the proclamations of the UN or international bodies have no force, within this kind of discourse, against the claims to sacredness. The sacred is taken to be simply above and beyond the political. And yet the sacralisation of land, as we have seen, is a political rhetorical device used in political speeches—in an attempt to depoliticise the topic which is being addressed!
But did the sacralisation of the land in these cases of Kosovo and Crimea succeed in de-contesting and depoliticising the question of the national possession of these lands, at least for the intended audiences of these speeches? Did the audiences to whom these speeches were addressed believe that the (alleged) sacredness of the land resolves the question as to whom the land belongs? Of course, the audiences in these two cases were primarily the members of the speakers’ chosen nation, not the members of the other nation(s) contesting the territory. Only specialised surveys, exploring the impact of this sacralisation discourse on members of the chosen nation—which to my knowledge have not been conducted—could give us some indication as to how persuasive these arguments were.
In order for the sacralisation speech to have any effect on its listeners, the sacralised land needs to have been identified in a national historical narrative as the site of a key historical event; further, this narrative should be widely accessible through the educational system, the media and/or oral tradition (such as the folk oral epic poetry on Kosovo). There is no doubt that the condition of previous acquaintance with the key historical event(s) (martyrdom/baptism/battles) has been satisfied in the cases of Kosovo and of Crimea. Once this condition is satisfied, the political leaders—in their guise of preachers—are just ‘reminding’ their audiences of something they know (or should know) and then, on the basis of this knowledge, revealing to them how sacred this land is to them. In both Milošević’s and Putin’s speeches there is a common template: ‘The great bravery of your ancestors displayed on X is known to you; X is thus sacred to you and to your own sense of who you are’. Putin’s speeches follow an additional—perhaps even more direct template—‘X is the place of origin of your religious and national identity, therefore it is sacred to you and your sense of your own self’.
The two templates exhibit another feature of the sacralisation speech: its direct personal appeal to the listener. Following the first we get: It is the bravery of your ancestors—the bravery that you should be, naturally, inheriting. Since it is your ancestors who displayed it on this land, the land became yours too—in virtue of sharing the same identity with your brave ancestors. The land belongs to your nation—and to you too as a member of the nation. Following the second template, in Putin’s speeches, we get: Your ancestor(s) was first baptised there a long time ago and this baptism created the nation to which you belong: the place of baptism is the place which belongs to you as a member of that nation.
In addition to depoliticising the contested territory, the sacralisation speech thus personalises the relationship between the sacred land and the target listeners—the members of the chosen nations. This is an additional reason for deploying this topos: it removes the contested land from political controversy and makes it a personal sacred object.
Sacralisation of territory, as Smith (1999) notes, predates the rise of modern nationalism and its discourses and was initially based on a variety of religious beliefs and doctrines. An early example of a sacralisation speech by an elected politician/preacher is found in Pericles’ Funeral Oration in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides, 1961, 2: pp. 35-47). In his speech Athens is sacralised not only by its unique democratic political regime but also by its ancestors’ valour/nobility in defending it: ‘Such, then, is the city for which these men nobly fought and died, deeming it their duty not to let her be taken from them; and it is fitting that every man who is left behind should suffer willingly for her sake’ (Thucydides, 1961, 2:41:5, pp. 331-333). In Pericles’s speech the sacralisation of Athens is the integral part of his elaborate self-congratulatory and self-flattering oration, exhorting its citizens to continue to fight for the city and its empire.
As Smith’s examples (1999) suggest, sacralisation discourse is not deployed only in contemporary non-liberal regimes such as those of Milošević and Putin: such a discourse, because of its apparent non-political and personal appeal, is a powerful instrument of legitimisation, mobilisation and exhortation regardless of the type of political environment in which it is deployed.