Poor Connections

By Jeremy F. Walton

In recent years, research ethics have become a site of intensive inspection and introspection across European institutions of higher education that channel substantial public monies into academic projects. Ethical protocols and commitments have expanded to constitute a new form of academic governmentality and self-discipline. The consequences of this new academic ethicality are legion: academic production must be objectified, frequently as “data,” to suit the evaluation procedures of institutional ethics regimes; researchers in humanistic disciplines must perform discursive contortions to fulfill ethical guidelines designed for the natural sciences; institutional bureaucracies grow ever more bloated in order to monitor the practices of researchers under the rubric of ethics. Our blog series, “Research Ethics Beyond Guidelines,” has interrogated each of these themes, and others. In my contribution, however, I want to point out a neglected aspect of the heavily ethicized field of European academia: the manner in which research ethics as a fantasy of best academic practice abets and exacerbates longstanding regional hierarchies among nation-states, and fundamentally complicates the professional lives of scholars who mediate between pan-European discourses and local institutions. There are connections here that have yet to be adequately grasped.

Connections. Veze. Apart from a standard smattering of obscenities, this is one of the first words that a non-native speaker of Croatian learns. The phrase “nema veze,” literally “there’s no connection,” peppers daily speech—it serves as an all-purpose statement of reassurance, akin to “no problem” in English, or a blanket statement of irrelevance, not far from the dismissive “whatever.” On the other hand, the plural noun veze is the standard term for personal contacts that might ease the functioning of otherwise impersonal bureaucratic structures. While veze can carry the negative connotation of nepotism, its meaning can also be neutral or even positive. Bourdieu’s concept of social capital captures the ubiquity of veze as the intersubjective tissue that unevenly connects people to one another. Yet there is another aspect of veze that harries Croatia beyond its sociological descriptive capacity. The notion of veze constitutes an ambivalent ideology and fantasy in Croatian public life. It registers both frustration and fear in relation to the impersonal hegemony of bureaucratic rationality and legitimacy, especially as embodied by the European Union and “Brussels.” The persistence of clientelist veze in Croatia threatens to frustrate aspirations to “fully” European behavior and belonging, even as the austere indifference of EU bureaucracies to veze is frequently an object of disdain and criticism.

The specter of veze persistently complicates academic life in Croatia, especially at the interface and fault-line between national and European-wide institutions and funding sources. An aura of prestige bordering on awe accompanies European projects in Croatia, and provokes extreme bureaucratic vigilance. Veze are a bugbear that inspires institutional surveillance throughout Croatian academia, but “European” funding is uniquely sensitive, and warrants protection from the pollution of veze and the misappropriation of resources that veze imply. Accordingly, the invocation of veze serves as an ironclad justification for bureaucratic oversight and intervention. The matter of veze therefore creates surprising yet symptomatic ethical challenges for researchers in Croatia—dilemmas that resonate across other nation-states that remain semi-peripheral to the political heartlands of the European Union.

In order to understand the immense power of veze as an ideology, a brief digression on Croatia’s post-Yugoslav transformation is apposite. This is a familiar story across postsocialist central and eastern Europe. During the Homeland War (Domovinski rat) that followed Croatia’s secession from Yugoslavia in 1991, the upheavals of wartime and political transformation resulted in vast transfers of wealth and resources from the state to quasi-state and private ownership. This process of privatization was a pell-mell of primitive capitalist accumulation that depended, above all, on one’s position and connections in the revolutionary political landscape. The most notorious example of this political economy of connections was the nascent state’s sponsorship of the so-called “200 families,” who were envisioned as the new elite that would set Croatia’s course from an eastern European, socialist past to a western European, capitalist future.[1] In brief, veze—social and political capital—were indispensable to postsocialist affluence and influence in Croatia. However, the contradictions between the political economy of clientelism and state liberalism in the western European fashion—already incipient in the 1990s and early 2000s—rapidly intensified, especially once Croatia became a candidate for EU membership in 2006. While veze persisted in various ways, they became increasingly intolerable in the public realm. By the time of Croatia’s EU accession in 2013, veze had become ideological shorthand for a disavowed political culture, one which had to be overcome in order to achieve authentic “European-ness.”

As a figure of illiberal clientelism, veze registers the impact of broader ideological discourse on eastern Europe and the Balkans. Scholars such as Maria Todorova (2009) and Larry Wolff (1994) have famously interrogated the ambivalent images of selfhood in relation to western European metropolitan culture that resolutely dog eastern and southeastern Europeans. Paradoxically, the ostensible incapacity of eastern Europeans and residents of the Balkans to be “fully” European provokes ideological and behavioral overcompensation. This sort of mimicry of metropolitan values and practices—familiar in colonial contexts, too (Bhaba 1994)—yields deep ironies. To exaggerate one’s performance of Europeanness—to be “too” European—is itself a sign of not being European “enough.”The menace of veze in Croatia sharply illustrates this paradoxical logic. Vigilance in preventing veze from determining advantage in public life is itself a symptom of a “not yet fully” liberal political culture that remains imperfectly European. Veze as undesirable social capital are a mark of Croatia’s recalcitrant Balkan Otherness, but so too is the ideological paranoia over veze that seeks “connections” everywhere in order to stamp them out.

Hiring practices in Croatian academia offer potent lessons in the ironies of veze as an ideological fantasy. Unsuccessful candidates for postdoctoral fellowships or professorships in Croatia possess an enviable resource: they are able to contest the result of a public competition (natječaj) on the basis of any perceived irregularity. Such complaints often amount to bureaucratic pettifoggery that seeks to disqualify a successful candidate on the basis of an obscure technicality. However, objections also take the form of accusations of veze: inappropriate social and professional relations between members of the hiring committee and the chosen candidate. The deep irony, of course, is that social relations—veze in the non-ideological sense—saturate and orient processes of professional advancement in Croatia, as they do elsewhere. Typically, the pool of candidates for a position in Croatia is shallow, and all of them are known to both one another and to the members of the hiring committee. However, everyone involved must behave as if such social relations did not exist, and do not play a role in the ostensibly disinterested procedure of assigning points (bodova) to each candidate on the basis of their “objective” qualifications. Veze as ideological fantasy and fear demands the pretense of denying veze in practice.

Official abhorrence of veze complicates academic research in Croatia in more pragmatic ways, too. Any scholar in Croatia who has managed a scientific project is surely familiar with the dilemmas and exasperations that attend public tenders, nabave. In order to employ public funds—whether national or European—to make a purchase from a private company in Croatia, one must open a public tender and receive no less than three competing offers for the good or service in question. Yet again, the bugbear of veze and the need to avoid them absolutely explain this unwieldy procedure: the requirement of at least three bids ostensibly removes the possibility that social connections determine the dispensation of public funds. The ironclad logic of nabave as a panacea to veze can easily result in surreal, Kafkaesque circumstances. For instance, in the process of producing a documentary film for my European Research Council project, REVENANT: Revivals of Empire—Nostalgia, Amnesia, Tribulation (https://revenant.uniri.hr), a faculty lawyer suggested that I would have to open a public tender simply in order to film a few extra minutes of footage. Directly hiring the filmmaker with whom I was already working would potentially violate the prohibition on veze.

When faced with the dilemmas of veze in Croatia, I recall my academic training in the United States of America with a keen, critical nostalgia. As anyone who has weathered the gauntlet of a job search in the American academy knows very well, veze, social connections, thoroughly suffuse the process of recruitment and advancement there, too. Indeed, it would be sociologically naive to expect otherwise. In the USA, however, a different ideology and fantasy shields the institutional power of veze: meritocracy. American academics excel at pretending as if professional achievement is a transparent record of individual merit. The ample anxieties inherent to the meritocratic fantasy are difficult to sublimate—I have yet to do so effectively myself.  By comparison, the paranoia over veze in Croatian academic circles is relatively simple for me, a foreigner, to deconstruct ethnographically. Yet whether in Croatia, the United States, western Europe or elsewhere, an intractable question persists: why are social relations so anathema to the ideological self-conceptions of academic institutions? I suspect that the answer lies in the neoliberal marketization of academic labor generally, but this is a topic for another, longer context.

Poor connections. They persist despite their denial and demonization. Whom we know as professionals and what we know as scholars cannot ultimately be untangled. To do so would be ethically suspect. Is this ultimately a crisis demanding bureaucratic watchfulness and anxious self-scrutiny? I’m tempted to respond as one might in Croatian—“nema veze.”

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Works Cited

Bhaba, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York & London: Routledge.

Todorova, Maria. 2009. Imagining the Balkans. 2^nd Ed.New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wolff, Larry. 1994. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Footnotes

[1] The notion that 200 select families (200 obitelji) would guide the post-Yugoslav Croatian economy is generally attributed to the first president of Croatia, Franjo Tuđman. Tuđman’s legacy and the ongoing electoral power of his party, the Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica or, HDZ), remain central to politics in Croatia today.

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About the Author

Jeremy F. Walton is a cultural anthropologist whose research resides at the intersection of memory studies, urban studies, the comparative study of empires and imperialism, and critical perspectives on materiality. He leads the research group “REVENANT—Revivals of Empire: Nostalgia, Amnesia, Tribulation” at the University of Rijeka, Croatia, with support from a European Research Council consolidator grant (#10100290). Prior to this, he led the Max Planck Research Group, “Empires of Memory: The Cultural Politics of Historicity in Former Habsburg and Ottoman Cities,” at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany. Dr. Walton’s first book, Muslim Civil Society and the Politics of Religious Freedom in Turkey (Oxford University Press, 2017), is an ethnography of Muslim NGOs, state institutions, and secularism in contemporary Turkey. His research has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including American Ethnologist, Die Welt Des Islams, History and Anthropology, The Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, The Journal of Material Culture, Jadaliyya and Sidecar (The New Left Review). REVENANT, which Dr. Walton designed, is an interdisciplinary, multi-sited project on postimperial memories and legacies in post-Habsburg, post-Ottoman realms, and post-Romanov realms.

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Citation: Jeremy F. Walton, Poor Connections, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 03.12.2024, https://doi.org/10.58079/12td3

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