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In Croatia, an allegedly independent group of experts have pulled the strings in the handling of the coronavirus pandemic. But this crisis management has in fact been deeply political, writes journalist and novelist Slavenka Drakulić. Dependent on tourism, EU’s youngest member state plays a risky game where political power and economy stand against the lives of the most vulnerable. In the end the future of democracy could be at stake.

Most of us have seen one of the popular Covid-19 memes that says “Can we reset 2020? It has a virus!” or something along those lines. Croatia would, indeed, badly need such a reset. The country did not have much luck this year, haunted by several plagues, one after the other. First came the presidency of the Council of the European Union, which Croatia held from January to June. Then Corona hit. And, in the middle of all that, a major earthquake shook Zagreb, the country’s capital. Then followed the risky gambling with early parliamentary elections. And, finally, the challenges of (collapsing) tourism.

The Croatian presidency of the EU was a big challenge, with historical tasks such as Brexit and the immigration crisis on the Union’s south-eastern borders on the agenda. But Croatia’s over-sized ambitions of contributing effective solutions and the illusion of its power and importance ended in June, without any memorable result. It would be easy to blame the pandemic for the meagre outcome, but as critics put it, the positioning of Croatia was wrong from the start. Instead of choosing to take on a leading role in the region and help Serbia, Montenegro, Albania and North Macedonia with their problems and further their negotiations with the EU the government wanted to be on the equal footing with the big European players. The Croatian presidency left no mark on EU politics.

When the Croatian government declared the coronavirus pandemic on 11 March, it turned out to be the start of an exercise in returning to a police state. An expert body of allegedly politically non-allied scientists and managers of health institutions, which curiously included the minister of the interior from the governing party HDZ, was formed to manage the pandemic. Bypassing the parliament, this group issued orders for a lockdown and decided about everything else related to the coronavirus, from the closing down of schools and tram lines, to the isolation of groups and individuals, to the compulsory wearing of masks in shops and public transport.

Interestingly, citizens obeyed the new rules without protest, regardless of their questionable legitimacy and anti-democratic character. Not even the opposition opposed! On the one hand, fear of the virus united them all. But on the other, this extraordinary obedience was prepared by Croatia’s authoritarian past as part of Yugoslavia. When in trouble, people not only flock together, but also resort to the type of political leadership they know and recognize.

Perhaps this is best illustrated by the habitual willingness to delegate the responsibility for decisions to a higher authority which used to be the Communist Party because they are supposed to “know better”. It is as if this legacy of the communist system still prevents citizens to believe in their own rights or even to question any decisions. The experience of democracy has in this context just been one of a new form for the old way of party- dominant governing. It didn’t take long for people in the new states formed after the fall of Yugoslavia to understand that party membership still is the shortcut to power and money.

Not even the earthquake in Zagreb on 22 March with 5.5 on the Richter scale it was the strongest since 1880 could shake the Croats enough to get them out of the Corona slumber they had fallen in. Some 25 000 buildings were damaged, about 2000 of them had to be evacuated. Many schools, hospitals, museums and other cultural institutions were affected and also people were injured. The city centre, with the historic old town, was hit the most. This natural disaster was followed by confusion and scandals surrounding the financing of the reconstruction, revealing severe manipulation and suspected embezzlement by the city administration. However, all this was overshadowed by the news and stories about the all-dominating coronavirus.

If citizens at first accepted the so-called expert body, believing that their task was to save human lives, they soon came to understand that there was a strong political aspect to it. It became apparent that this group functions as an extension of HDZ, the ruling party. Fear and control over the pandemic meaning a comparatively low number of sick and dead became the most important building block of securing the early parliamentary elections. The ruling party wanted to quickly profit from the virus by appropriating the good image of the expert body and the results of the first lockdown. Well aware that the lockdown would not be sustainable in the long run not least because of the start of the tourist season they scheduled the elections for 5 July. Prime minister Andrej Plenković decided to use the post-corona and pre-tourism moment. Part of the motivation for this time slot was no doubt the fear of tourists spreading virus once the borders would be open.

However, Plenković’s second and even bigger fear was probably another, namely that tourism, the most profitable “product” of the country, contributing around 20 per cent of the GDP, would collapse. This autumn, Croatia might face its biggest economic crisis ever clearly not at good time for elections. The calculation to save the budget by opening borders and loosening Corona-prompted restrictions in order to get as many tourist as possible is a risky one. My colleague Viktor Ivančić from the former weekly Feral Tribune describes it as an example of the politics of “sustainable bio-economy” applied by the Croatian government. According to Ivančić’s satirical definition, this “sustainable bio- economy” is based on the premise that it is responsible and rational to allow the demise of one group of people from Covid-19, if it prevents the rest of the population from starving to death. In case you think this is a specifically Croatian calculation, just consider the similar approach in Sweden, where the wellbeing of the majority is weighed against the suffering of the most vulnerable. Other countries with popular tourist destinations, such as Spain, Greece or Italy, are doing exactly the same: the strategy to save the budget by lifting restrictions to allow for the influx of tourists is based on the toleration of a certain number of people dying. Someone has yet to specify how high the acceptable number of deaths is in this morbid equation.

The calculation with the timing of the election proved right, although the ballot coincided with an increasing number of infections. The prime minister and his party won. This time the general impression is that the new-old prime minister is steering HDZ towards the centre, away from the radical right that has been dominating in the past. Plenković’s and HDZ’s luck was that Croatia is a small and not very important country, living and dying at the edge of the EU while the big countries barely notice what is happening in the periphery…

Be that as it may, the new government will now have to start tackling real problems, from unemployment to legal and economic reforms, to the growing number of refugees and immigrants pressing on Croatia’s border with Bosnia and Herzegovina. And despite that Croatia is one of the biggest “winners” of the EU coronavirus recovery package negotiated in July, they will have to do it with a rather scarce budget.

The virus is changing not only our personal and social habits but also our economic situation. And it changes our political behaviour. These changes will decide the near future, not only in Croatia, but in the EU as well. The pandemic has revealed how fragile our existence actually is, both our lives and our way of life. Faced with a major catastrophe, we see the institutions we built to protect ourselves falling apart. The fear for our lives risks undermining further the already fragile foundations of our democracy.

Debates on Europe Published on 6 August 2020

This article is available in English, French, German, and Italian on Voxeurop.

Slavenka Drakulić is a Croatian journalist, novelist, and essayist whose works on feminism, communism, and post-communism have been translated into many languages. In 2004 she received the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding. Her new book, Cafe Europa Revisited. How to Survive Post-Communism, will be published by Penguin in spring 2021.

Russians have been living in a regimen of political self-isolation for a long time, writes Sergei Lebedev. He sees how the coronavirus connects today’s fundamental lack of trust with the crimes of the Soviet past. But will the Covid-19 crisis really have an impact on Putin’s rating and image?

When the first Covid-19 patients appeared in Russia and the virus began to spread, I was working in the Central Archive of the Federal Security Service (FSB). It holds documents of people repressed, arrested, and executed in the Stalin period.

Every morning I came to the inconspicuous building not far from Lubyanka, on Kuznetsky Most street, and was handed crumbling cardboard folders: the archive case files of my relatives and family friends.

I existed in two different times.

In one, the real time, there were world news about quarantines, closing borders, the new body etiquette: a ban on gatherings, masks, social distancing; in other words, the cessation or extreme reduction of contacts.

In the other time, the past, as I read the pages in the files, I saw something strangely and terribly similar.

I saw how a person called an enemy of the people instantly became contagious. His family, friends, and co-workers instantly ended up in the risk group. I observed through the interrogations transcripts and arrest warrants how this stigma, this deadly label passed from brother to brother, from father to children, among members of a philately club, among priests in a single town.

The virus, or more precisely the state of infection, was a physiological metaphor for political repression and its effects passed down generations: the withering and impoverishment of life, the destruction of public and human solidarity, the origin of the habit of viewing any contact as dangerous and any person as potentially contagious.

I think that this phenomenon had (and still has) an opposite, paradoxical side in Russia: an unspoken fatalistic consensus that life is not an unconditional value, that you cannot hide from history and the state and you cannot resist them, they have to be accepted as a natural catastrophe that has become part of daily life, like the epidemic.

With this anamnesis, Russian society met the new coronavirus.

The actions of the state were and still are predictable. A “national vote” was set for April 22 on amendments to the Constitution that would allow Vladimir Putin to be elected president two more times (according to the present Constitution, this is Putin’s last term) and represent yet another authoritarian and conservative turn in Russian politics: for example, one amendment says that a marriage is exclusively defined as “the union of a man and a woman.”

As long as there was the probability that the election and the Victory Day parade on May 9 could take place, the authorities diligently pretended that the coronavirus would not reach Russia, that it wasn’t so dangerous – one of the versions offered was that people born in the USSR and given the mandatory BCG vaccination against tuberculosis as children would not get Covid-19, that is, the Soviet past protects the Russian present.

But as soon as the data on infections reached threatening levels (even given that medical statistics, like all others, are obviously manipulated in Russia), the approach switched to the very opposite: severe quarantine, digital passes, apps in smartphones that tracked movement. These measures may be reasonable or partially reasonable, but when they are used by an authoritarian state in which citizens are not potential patients but potential suspects, when the top priority is discipline and not health, the effect is overwhelming. I think little did more to spread the virus in Moscow than the huge lines at metro entrances on the first day of electronic passes: the police were ordered to check every pass.

It is noteworthy that the public’s behavior in this situation revealed several critical deficits interrelated in a complicated way, which are acutely contradictory and which essentially make Vladimir Putin’s regime possible.

The first is the trust deficit; yes, toward the authorities, too, but primarily toward other citizens: here everyone saves himself or herself alone.

There is also a deficit of recognizing the other, of recognizing boundaries; a deficit of the respect that comes with understanding the value of other people’s lives: it is no surprise that the quarantine is perceived in Russia primarily not as a coordinated action of responsible citizens but as an imposed state measure that must be obeyed.

At the intersection of these two deficits exists a third: the deficit of civic responsibility.

The quarantine and social distancing merely show that we have been living in a regimen of political self-isolation for a long time; this is our reality, and it’s only now that it has become both metaphorically and physically visible.

Empty streets and alienation from politics – we lived this way long before Covid-19.

Many people in Russia are saying that the Covid-19 pandemic will have a serious impact on Putin’s rating and image. But it is important to remember that Putin knows how to gain strategic benefits from tactically terrible and hopeless situations. The hostage taking of a school in Beslan in 2004, which led to storming of the school and the death of hundreds of children, should have been the end of his career. Instead, using the excuse of fighting terrorism to strengthen power, Russia no longer has gubernatorial elections. I believe that we will soon see how the epidemic and its destructive consequences on national health and the economy will be used to justify yet another reduction of civil rights.

Translated from Russian by Antonina W. Bouis

Sergei Lebedev is a Russian writer whose books have been translated into 17 languages. Since 2010 he has written
five novels dedicated to the theme of the Soviet hidden past, the impact of Stalin’s repressions and its consequences
in modern Russian life. The New York Review of Books has praised Lebedev as “the best of Russia’s younger
generation of writers.”

When long-missed Lithuanian émigrés returned home during the Corona crisis they were no longer welcome. Like everything foreign they were treated as a threat. Marius Ivakevičius diagnoses a split corona personality, torn between mourning the openness lost and enjoying the new sedentary isolation.

In the Spring of 2020, when I had my first (and I hope only) experience of a global quarantine, I suddenly discovered that two very different if not opposed people live within me.

The first, who has now withdrawn into the shadows, met this pandemic and its shutting up of everyone and everything as no less than a personal tragedy. He was an open-world apologist who was used to fly to Europe and Russia several times a month (premieres, conferences, lectures), and to New York several times a year to visit a daughter studying there, and he watched in horror as long-forgotten borders reappeared in Europe and the idea itself of the European Union and its dream of unity were disappearing from our minds, He felt as though he had lost, had been crushed it was an instant and absolute triumph of the sedentary against the open.

It suddenly became normal to see foreigners as lepers. Even people we knew, who were scrambling to return home on the last possible flights. Then all that was left was to take sea ferries, which brought back long- forgotten émigrés. The same ones that a depleted Lithuania had for many years tried to lure back. But when the Homeland saw them it was horrified and said: no, we don t need people like that. It tried to isolate them in hotel rooms, where they drank and smashed furniture. Then the prime minister called them non-humans, thus further establishing the sedentary majoritys victory.

As a playwright, I gasped painfully as I watched theatres close across the world, including the thirteen that are performing my plays. This means that for the next few months, or perhaps even years, I will be without an income. As a father, I watched in sorrow as the skies emptied: the number of flights to Lithuania fell daily until only Minks Vilnius remained open. And with this so collapsed any hope of my fifteen-year-old daughter returning home from New York. From a New York that was bleeding more and more, until it finally became the centre of the pandemic the worst hotspot.

This is what was happening with me and within me during the first weeks of the quarantine. I often found myself flipping through the pages of an old Soviet-era atlas from my childhood. And I felt just as I had as a child: all of those distant, differently coloured countries were once again inaccessible, and therefore somewhat unreal, to me.

And then, suddenly, something shifted. That person who was open to the world withdrew and a sedentary one emerged. It was as though he had taken the wheel of my consciousness and set me onto a very short track, a strict, weekly rhythm: from Monday to Friday pleasantly back-breaking work writing a novel in the country followed by weekend excursions to an empty Vilnius. And it wasn t apathy, but rather a very focused period. I began to enjoy the emptiness, so that I stopped needing people and their company, except that of those closest to me. One morning I suddenly realised that on that day I would have flown from Tallinn to Baku, where the next day I would have begun leading a series of workshops for local playwrights. In other words, I would have spent the entire day being jostled in airplanes, with a stop in Istanbul. The mere thought made me shudder. I could no longer imagine that I once enjoyed such things. That other I”, the one open to the world, was already light years away.

I think that I was simply lucky: the quarantine came at a stage in my life in which I was in complete harmony with myself: I am happy with who I am, who I spend my time with, and what I do. As opposed to those for whom going to work or other forms of socialising are ways to escape from the small hell of their relationships. I felt true fulfilment, sharing, as I did, my disability with the rest of the quarantined world. I spent more time, and more meaningfully, with my daughter, who was imprisoned in a small Brooklyn apartment. My physical state markedly improved: all sorts of acid refluxes and other digestive problems vanished, as, it appears, they had been provoked by the constant, if imperceptible, microstress of travelling and switches from one cuisine to another.

And as the quarantine became stricter and voices could be heard urging authorities to practically declare a state of war and hand over control to the head of the military, I didn t launch into protest, though the old I would have been publicly sounding all the alarms. No, all I could think was: do what you want, as long as it doesn t interfere with my little quarantine paradise.

So, when the quarantine began to be gradually lifted, my now sedentary I saw it as a real tragedy and collapse. Everything annoyed me: the crowds of people, desperate to socialise, once again flooding the streets of Vilnius, the invitations to all sorts of events which I had to attend out of courtesy or sometimes duty. The foundation of my new life was slipping out from under my feet and I was grasping at straws: how could I stay on my short, sedentary tracks a little longer?

It was my daughter who saved me. The gradual revival of the airline industry made it possible to purchase a New York Frankfurt Vilnius ticket for her and to honestly tell all those issuing invitations: forgive me, but my daughter is returning from New York and I will be forced to isolate myself with her for two more weeks.

Everyday I anxiously scanned the growing list of countries from which travellers would no longer need to quarantine themselves; if the US should be added to it, my dream would be shattered.

When my daughter landed in Vilnius I spent an hour and a half waiting for her outside the airport (we were not allowed to enter it). I watched as other arriving passengers ripped off their masks as soon as they exited the gates, as though they had escaped to a long-dreamed-of freedom. And there I was waiting for my daughter, who would give me two more weeks of longed-for imprisonment.

Finally, she too appeared, the very last one, with her two enormous suitcases. I threw my arms around her and kissed her so that we would instantly exchange all possible viruses and bacteria. Then I led her to the car.

We drove directly to the country and now I am the happiest man in the world. I continue to write my novel, while she attends online classes in New York.

One day I cautiously suggested to her: how about isolating ourselves for the whole summer? She looked at me as though I was insane. Her mother, a diplomat, and I had barely been able to contain her in the New York apartment, as she was keen to run off to the Black Lives Matter protests, which most of her school friends were joining. We kept her at home by pointing out that diplomats children cannot participate in protests and warning her that if she ended up in jail she would miss her flight to Vilnius. And here I was, suggesting something even more absurd to her. Daddy, my friends are expecting me, she replied. As soon as these wretched two weeks are over you re driving me to Vilnius.

In other words, my sedentary I is living his final days. I will have seven premieres in the next theatre season from Moscow to Barcelona. They mean both money and glory, and my open I is praying for that theatre season to take place.

As for myself, I don’t know any more whether I want that or not. I’m completely lost. Translated from Lithuanian by Karla Gruodis

Debates on Europe Published on 18 June 2020

This article is available in English, French, German, and Italian on Voxeurop.

Marius Ivakevičius is a Lithuanian writer, playwright, and film director. His novels have been published in many foreign languages and his plays have been staged in Lithuania, Russia, Germany, Italy, France, and New Zealand. His accolades include 4 Best Lithuanian Play of the Year Awards and one Golden Mask Award for best play in Russia in 2017.

The coronavirus has revealed how fragile our freedoms are and just how little it takes to lose them. Both authorities and citizens have been complicit in turning the Covid-19 quandary into a manifestation of authoritarianism and social fragmentation, writes Serbian historian Dubravka Stojanović. Instead of herd immunity, we got herd democracy.

Medicine is struggling to understand all the mysteries and mechanisms of the coronavirus. In contrast, the coronavirus has fully unveiled the mysteries and mechanisms of many political regimes. It acted as a kind of blowup, amplifying everything that we have been witnessing for quite some time, but refused to see. The “invisible enemy” has rendered political problems visible. Primarily, it revealed how we handle freedoms in a crisis and how quickly freedom becomes burdensome when we feel threatened.

The pandemic has shown how seemingly distant regimes are actually alike, particularly those grounded in the fantasy of their own uniqueness and exceptionalism. From Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, to Viktor Orbán and Aleksandar Vučić to Boris Johnson, Trump and Bolsonaro, everyone’s initial reactions to the virus were very similar – first covering up the seriousness of the situation, then making fun of the virus, saying that it can’t do nothing to “us”, that “our” measures would not be like everyone else’s. Then some of them, when the death rate shook their initial unwavering positions, began introducing the most radical measures, maybe in an effort to remain exceptional. The pandemic, which they claimed was completely ludicrous, was taken seriously as an opportunity to twist their citizens’ hands and shut their mouths. Their glowing faces at press conferences clearly showed they were having the time of their lives, that the pandemic was a

unique opportunity to turn their mood swings into a system. In a word – to grant themselves every freedom imaginable. In this competitive discipline, Viktor Orbán stole the European spotlight, while Aleksandar Vučić, the ruler of my country, Serbia, went under the radar.

In the early days of the pandemic, Vučić sniggered in a press conference as he stood behind the doctors who claimed this was “the funniest virus ever as it exists only on Facebook” and urged Serbian women to rush to Milan and get a good deal on shoes under lockdown! And then Vučić introduced measures unlike those in any other country. He declared a state of emergency on his own, without parliamentary approval, violating the Constitution. Armed soldiers were deployed to the streets. People over 65 were forbidden to leave their houses. He introduced a 12-hour daily curfew (from 5 PM to 5 AM). On weekends people were placed under a round-the-clock curfew, and for Easter, the total ban on movement reached a record long 84 hours. The parliament was dissolved. A journalist who wrote about the conditions in hospitals was arrested. A musician was arrested for an undesirable song. Crisis Staff press conferences were canceled because asking questions about the pandemic was considered treasonous. One moment Vučić claimed that the pandemic could not touch us, that one could avoid getting sick by drinking slivovitz, and the next that there would be so many casualties the cemeteries would run out of space. Radical measures changed almost every day, rights were granted and then revoked. Pro-government tabloids spread fake news and conspiracy theories that contradicted what the Crisis Staff announced. Every effort was made to drive the citizens out of their wits and, in the prevailing anxiety, consolidate their belief in the leader and his strong grip.

This behaviour by the authorities was not unexpected. Really interesting, however, is how citizens handled their freedoms. In most countries, government approval ratings have soared. Both for those that introduced rational and effective anti-pandemic measures, but also for those that seized the opportunity and suspended freedoms while at the same time experiencing record high infection and death rates, for instance Serbia, which had the most stringent safety measures in the region, but more than double the number of cases per million compared to other ex-Yugoslav states. People flocked around their leaders, readily handing over their rights to those who knew how to use them better. Huddling together came instinctually, so opposition parties, at least in Serbia, also forgot their responsibilities and obligations to the citizens, saying how this was not the time to talk politics!

Many citizens readily adapted to the emergency situation. Many reveled in the opportunity to bring state violence down from the top to our little corner shop. As soon as lines formed outside stores, self-proclaimed kapos popped up, loudly demonstrating their newly gained power, shouting orders and intimidating people. Not out of concern for maintaining order, but out of pure pleasure. Some self-appointees pointed fingers at people over 65, kicked them out of shops, told them to go home. Police reports said that virtually everyone over 65 who violated the stay-at-home order was reported by their neighbor. Sounds familiar?

Along with this everyday sidewalk fascism, we saw a completely different phenomenon. In many places around the globe, the relaxation of measures was immediately followed by the virtually unbridled behavior of citizens. People crowded into cafes, parks and beaches, as if there had never

been any danger and as if it would never come. Many, from Bosnian politicians to German police officers, were caught violating the measures at secret parties, while people in Greece filled the reopened beaches. Even the Swedish authorities were confounded by the irresponsible behavior of citizens who carelessly crowded into cafes, so the government was forced to abandon parts of their trust-based policy.

It might seem as if I’m describing unrelated events. I don’t think so. On the contrary. I think these are different appearances of a system we call illiberal democracy. These regimes differ from each other, but what they have in common is the way they manage freedoms. It was on this point that the authorities and citizens found a common ground. The distribution of power from top to bottom came quickly. The citizens embraced the abolition of institutions as a release from responsibility. They understood the disregard for the law by the authorities as a hint that all restrictions are off. In losing their rights they saw an opportunity to appropriate what is left of their liberties and use them however they like. When the authorities suspended the restrictions, citizens took that as being free not to care about each other. Both the authorities and citizens took a chunk of what they needed at that moment, used it, and then threw it away when they got bored with it. They blamed the virus on the enemy (China, George Soros, Jews, migrants, 5G, Bill Gates…), and then went after him with all their might. They invoked science when they needed it, and ridiculed it when it did not work in their favor. They tried to damage every authority, questioned everything, spread and sowed doubt to undermine trust, unity and solidarity. By letting themselves be caught up in this game, citizens also contributed to social fragmentation, to the construction of frightened and insecure individuals wishing for someone to come and slam their fist against the table. What Covid-19 has shown is how fragile our freedoms are, and just how little it takes to lose them. To everyone’s delight.

We did not achieve herd immunity, but we got herd democracy. It looks like we need to start over.

Translation from Serbian by Ivica Pavlović

© Debates on Europe Published on 11 June 2020

This article is available in English, French, German, and Italian on Voxeurop.

Dubravka Stojanović is a professor of history at Belgrade University. Her work focuses on democracy in Serbia and the Balkans, the interpretation of history in textbooks, social history, the process of modernisation, and the history of women in Serbia. She is vice-president of the History Education Committee and a consultant to the United Nations, working on issues concerning history, memory, and the misuse of history in education.