Belgrade 1714-2014: Utopianism and urbicideauthentic “spirit” or “urban spirit” mutates since it is composed of the people
themselves, their habits, customs, value systems, and not just of the history,
the inherited culture and institutions?
After the fall of communism in Eastern Europe the middle class was generally
considered as a desirable mediator between the public policies, the ideologies
and their application in a wide social base. (There is the opinion that the
“neoliberal era” generated the disappearance of the middle class, but such
assumptions are still not convincingly documented: statism has already been
a pro-totalitarian answer to the financial crisis free market challenges). It
is interesting that the middle class layers become most prone to nostalgic
memories of social certainty that was seemingly offered during the communist
era. The Post-Cold-War nationalism has also appeared as the by-product
of communism. The “Socialist Eden” has actually affected the middle class
immobility and thwarted the small and middle business development, as
essential forces in the democratic effort to control the state institutions and to
restrain the destructive social forces for a long term.
The globalization is a challenge deprived of empirical precedent. We are also
facing significant changes in Eastern and Southeastern Europe during the last
25 years and after the first decade of the European Union accession of several
Eastern European Countries in 2004. The Yugoslav violent disintegration
launched in Belgrade in 1991, and ended in Belgrade by the NATO intervention in
1999, led, however, to the ethnic homogenization, poverty, cultural degradation
etc. Belgrade remains, not only due to its controversies, an exceptional example
with significant details different to the general East-European post-totalitarian
development pattern. After the political changes in 2000, Belgrade was only
partially renewed and revitalized, entering in the global era with a burden of
already outdated dilemmas of the previous European developments, especially
ones that Serbian society didn’t manage to resolve along with the fall of the
communism.
More than a “global city”, Belgrade is a rural or post-rural conglomerate
characterized by visual, emotional, ideological and material traumas of wars,
holocaust, poverty, lack of efficient institutions and rule of law, a micro-culture
of individual irresponsibility and incompetent development solutions. The
urbanity of Belgrade is above all a reflection of the middle class continual crisis.
Belgrade is as a human community and culture the historical loser in all the
wars and political conflicts in the 20th and at the beginning of the 21st century. In
that sense the discontinuities, the social pressures and the elite manipulations
were depraving the city of intellectual and moral capacities that would create
its institutions and society as a reliable foundation of democracy development
and rule of law. Parallel to the peaks of nationalism that in Serbia and similar
systems replaced the fall of the communism, the globalization eroded the
social and economic foundation of the middle class that the contemporary
liberal democracy is based upon.