SERBIA’S ARGUMENT WITH ITSELF

ANTI-COMMUNISM AS IDEOLOGY AND THE POLITICS OF FORGETTING

Abstract

The paper examines the ideological trajectory of post-socialist Serbia, arguing that anticommunism has functioned as a destructive political ideology that has significantly undermined the country’s socio-economic development and democratic consolidation. The author contends that prevailing public narratives attributing Serbia’s contemporary difficulties to a “communist continuity” are empirically unfounded, given that Yugoslavia was never a communist state, and that market mechanisms and legal pluralism were gradually institutionalised well before the system’s collapse. The analysis traces how the dissolution of Yugoslavia enabled nationalist political elites to construct anti-communism as a legitimising framework, effectively displacing evidence-based policy and discourse with ideological anti-empiricism. The Socialist Party of Serbia is identified as a pivotal actor in this transformation, abandoning class-based internationalism in favour of Serbian nationalism, accelerating the erosion of socialist solidarity and economic principles based on labour. The paper further argues that the shift from labour-based to coercion-based legitimacy, enabled through politically controlled privatisation and violent nationalism, has produced enduring institutional deficits. Nevertheless, the recent developments suggest a generational reorientation towards rule of law, transparency, and solidarity – values that challenge the anti-communist ideological inheritance that has shaped contemporary Serbia.