The Hybrid Discourse of the Serbian Antibureaucratic Revolution

Abstract

This article investigates the discursive logic of the antibureaucratic revolution through discourse analysis of three Serbian dailies: Politika, Borba, and Večernje Novosti. We conceptualize this discursive logic as a hybrid discourse, employed by Slobodan Milošević's faction of the political elite and by prominent Serbian press outlets in their discussions and reporting on the diverse Serbian protest movements of the day. The core of the hybrid discourse, as our analysis demonstrates, consisted of the symbolic interweaving of different types of citizens' discontent in order to present them as one single demand for societal reform that resonated with the agenda of the Serbian political elite. We argue that the hybrid discourse and the antibureaucratic revolution itself had a structural role related to the crisis of systemic legitimacy in Yugoslavia. The hybrid discourse performed the operation of what we term the reversing of the symbolic fixing of antagonism between the ordinary actors' discontents and the structurally inevitable reforms, introducing instead the discursive fusion of the two vocabularies.