National integration, media and democracy in post-Milosevic Serbia: Socialist legacies, neoliberal strategies

This dissertation offers a socio-historical analysis of media and democratization in post-Milosevic Serbia. The transformation of Serbian media structures and practices is framed around competing notions of democracy and a clash between two opposing conceptions of national integration: the universalism of an egalitarian legal republic and the particularism of a community united by historical destiny, common language and culture.;The complicated issues of national integration, state formation, and media in two consecutive historical periods, are critically reviewed highlighting ideological, structural and cultural legacies influencing Serbia's ongoing transformation. The media transformation process has centered on privatization and the construction of a legalistic regulatory framework, changes which have resulted in the alienation of Serbian media institutions from both from journalists and a society deeply ambivalent about the choice between universalism and particularism. The dissertation assesses both the elitist nature of the transformation and the controversial micro-dynamics of power as it operates among the agents of change.;This dissertation argues that Serbia's unresolved questions of external and internal sovereignty have the integrative capacity of the democratization process less effective. Moreover, a form of integration through ethnic bonding still prevails and presents a powerful challenge to the still-embryonic social bonding achieved through democratic citizenship. The tension between the nationalistic and republican conceptions of democracy has contributed to the contradictory and volatile development of a Serbian constitutional democracy, public sphere and democratic media. The dissertation concludes that the polarized pluralist system of media and politics found in southern Europe also provides important insights guiding our consideration about the possible direction of the Serbian transformation.;The ousting by the democratic opposition in 2000 of the authoritarian and nationalist Milosevic regime set in motion, in conjunction with the capitalist transformation of Serbia's economy and society, the development of democratic processes and institutions. In the process, domestic political elites and media reformers discounted participatory democracy as a form of media organizing, embracing instead the liberal and elitist notion of democracy advocated by Western governments and aid organizations.