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| OF POLITICAL ACTION OF TOGETHER FOR SUMADIJA |
We feel no opposition between freedom and law, as my freedom internally contains implicit respect for the freedom of others, which is the fundamental law. We feel no opposition between progress and tradition, as they are derived from the same source – the wisdom of life and history. We feel no contradiction between freedom and morality, as moral values are accepted only on the basis of one's personal choice, never of force. We feel, however opposition between individualistic nature of man and his unnatural collectivistic enslavement.
Vaclav Klaus
Of all the notions pertaining to the state and society of the future we strive for, the two most significant for us are: decentralization and economic recovery. Not because we cannot think broadly, but because in politics particularly, one should think strictly.
We wish to separate the cultural and political background, the broad area of divided attention, from the focus on the basic landmarks in terms of value. The dilemmas which have tired the people through politics, such as monarchy or republic, civil or national, morality or interest, tradition or modernization, are most frequently false questions, or, in a more shaded contrast, questions of taste, answers to which do not have the anticipated political importance. Furthermore, the real political importance of too forceful an actualization of such issues lies, more often than not, in distraction from real issues of the politics in Serbia surprised by the 21 st century.
Hometown as a more intimate space led, in terms of local authority, by dedicated politicians
Historically speaking, Serbian capitals have been forsaken to the perspective of provincial existence and anguish, some even to foreign rule. Deprived of ruler's power, influence, esteem and glory, they have inadvertently extinguished entrepreneurial spirit and ambition, holding on to a dying, casual memory of the days of former glory, void of any sense of duty for anyone. Even the manner in which this memory of more prominent past is being preserved clearly indicates the intention to use it in order to compensate for the losses produced by the present moment and present deprivation. In such a way the threatening awareness of the historic position and importance of the area transforms into a compensation and a myth completing the small town atmosphere which permeates former Serbian capitals.
This small town atmosphere also claims the undying readiness to put the blame for everything on Belgrade, the present capital and the central seat of real power and basic destination of metropolisation of Serbian life today. This skilled bureaucratic game of shifting responsibility and seasoned talent of a small town to hold Belgrade responsible for everything is equally true and misleading. Far from completely innocent in this matter, Belgrade is the unrivalled centre of the deeply centralized Serbian state, equipped with exclusive attributes of the only capital, absolute decision-maker in Serbia, which has outgrown the field of economy and started to influence the metaphysical plan, conceptualizing the very meaning of life of a generation.
Thus, the relationship between Belgrade and Serbia is easily interpreted through the dialectics of categorical metaphysical opposites present – absent . The excitements, values, even reality itself can be created and preserved only in Belgrade, which is the place to be, while everything else in Serbia falls under a deep shade and a question mark, between the brackets, marked as irrelevant, anguishing as a simulation of reality in which every effort is futile and bound to fail and be forgotten. In such a way Serbia becomes a God-forsaken place where each and every existence and destiny is accidental and leading straight into a deep abyss, against which Belgrade is emphasized as the only point of light, the stronger and brighter the darker the background.
However, Belgrade cannot be blamed for the fact that the natural strife of the will for power to spread is nowhere thwarted by the resistance of a differently directed effort. Belgrade cannot be solely accountable for the fact that Serbian towns, including former capitals, have lost their measure of self-respect and the need to overcome. At least some decisions are made by the local leaders and people of distinction, politicians and creators, entrepreneurs and all the others who like to languish behind the overrated importance of those named as the first. More precisely, although it is true that everything in Belgrade, both belonging to the government and opposition, private and public sector, is instinctively aware of this systematic advantage and ready to advocate and defend it as a permanent privilege, it is also true that the passivity of the rest of Serbia, predominant both in area and in population, the readiness to shift the responsibility for the orientation and the state of the nation to Belgrade, is an integer part of one and the same paradigm of Belgrade as the capital.
Conformity, pursuit of personal career, popular small town's indulgence in the absence of any personal responsibility on one, and European glamour of metropolitan Belgrade on the other hand, are nothing but the two extremes combined in a unified structure which regulates the currents of values and life in Serbia today, already known as Belgradisation of Serbia. Belgradisation is nothing but a predominantly sociological term for what was, ominously in the past, threateningly in the present, historically and epically regarded as the reduction of Serbia to the County of Belgrade. This is arguably the most descriptive picture of the evil inflicted onto the Serbian culture and its national identity by the communist revolution and the regime of Tito's Yugoslavia. Faced with the explicit condemnation of Serbian nationalism, in the name of which even the small Serbian man was initially openly terrorized, then covertly repressed, the national being was, through its survival instinct, forced to adjust. As if collective memory could find no better model of adjustment to repression than that formed during Turkish time and rule. In this way Serbian national being, largely bred on civil, pro-European values, adjusted to the tenets of communist revolution and socialist self-government, reawakening atavistic submissiveness and historically returning to pre-revolutionary form of life built within the County of Belgrade.
If democratic changes in Serbia have the character and strength of the new social deal, the process of decentralization and demetropolisation of the state and society is imminent, and has all the features of national liberation in broader, nationalistic terms. There where the awakening of Serbia started once, where the reservoir of national will and reviving energy is located, there is the natural source of this new wave of emancipation – the centre and core of Serbian nation and state, the first capital of the rebuilt Serbia – Kragujevac in Sumadija. The issues of national importance originating from Sumadija and Kragujevac ended gloriously. Today, Kragujevac is making preparations for a new beginning, with solemn intentions, inviting Serbia to gather around its reliable fundaments, to return to its own historical and civilisational corridor.
Modern Serbia came to life in the first half of the 19 th century as a municipality of Kragujevac. This is where it obtained, through establishment of first national educational, cultural, political and legal institutions, its European identity. National and European had been considered as equal though the entire pre-communist history of modern Serbia. Today's Europeanization of Serbia cannot be successful either as Brussels- or Belgrade-made identity surgery. Placing Serbia into the European community of peoples is not a matter of foreign policy or a consequence of a skillful diplomatic maneuver. Because it is the internal question of organization and distribution of common values. European values cannot be artificially implanted in Serbia because they already are the suppressed heritage of this country. Discontinuity with the heritage of the regime established through communist terror and the return to its own civil heritage represents a solemn, Sumadija's own, gateway to Europe.
Freedom as a source of private initiative and socially responsible state as a partner in establishment of a developing market
Man is freedom, and only freedom knows responsibility. Its material and spiritual goods can present true wealth because only in the environment of individual freedom can one confirm one's self as productive. Consequentially, it is not quantities that make the difference between a state and a kinder garden. All political constructions leading to any modality of a condescending, happiness-oriented, fatherly state are deals with the devil. The devil lavishes rewards first. And eventually states his request. As he has already managed to pay, he leaves the gift-taker to the drama of recognition of one's self in the role of the hired hand. The plot is always the same, the soul is requested, the man himself, which is to say freedom.
The state which has no right to monitor the personal freedom of an individual is not the state which could dare to take the responsibility to provide one's personal happiness. It has been known since the beginning of time that a man cannot be happy on his own. Community is the condition of his personal happiness, community established through exchange. A community broader than familial community of love, the community of citizens, is established like a market, either as a square, the place of communicative exchange and publicity of a polis, or a market-place, where the entire community exchanges material goods. Civil society is a market. The protection of the market is the fundamental responsibility of a state, while its security equals the security of the ownership rights.
Transitional ad-hoc privatization is the source of general insecurity and the crisis of the state. This process must be ended quickly, though not completely. The state appears as the factor of stabilization of trust and the carrier of social responsibility. This is why strategically important public property must remain in the hands of public, being the basis of state guaranties. However, it should not and cannot be a competitive rival of the private property. It should represent a challenge for the partnership of the private and public sector, boosting investment activity. Such an activity is the only healthy form of the permanent solution of the social tensions through creation of conditions for the full employment.
Such a state is neither above not outside the market. It is not a warden-state, or a policeman-state, its metaphor is not a uniform. It is a clerk-state, its metaphor is a client-friendly information desk. Only in such a state can the uniform gain its civil dignity. Such a state does not lead the society to any final state of affairs of any given utopia. It follows life along the way built by free individuals linked through myriads of enterprises. Guiding by rules, more recognized in living activity than prescribed, it measures in relation to one, apparently, general tendency: to create and preserve extensive and strong middle-class which is really capable and willing to spend.
Such a state is, essentially, based on a renown Sumadian characteristic, which is actually the essence of universal human resourcefulness – that is the natural and healthy need to prosper. |
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