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The Culture of Power in Serbia: Nationalism and the Destruction of Alternatives, by Eric D. Gordy. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. $58.50 cloth. ISBN: 0-271-01957-3. $17.95 paper. ISBN: 0271-01958-1.
Gordy's thesis in The Culture of Power in Serbia is that Slobadan Milosevic's hold on power in the 1990s was predicated upon two factors, the passive support of a large segment of the Serbian people and his destruction of alternative avenues of information, expression, and sociability. Of course, any analysis of the culture of power in Serbia would have to investigate the use of nationalistic rhetoric on the part Milosevic's regime, and this book is no exception. Gordy's key argument, however, is that Milosevic remained in office not so much by fanning the flames of nationalism as by eliminating alternatives to his rule, thereby producing "habituation, resignation, and apathy" (p. 7).
The author begins his discussion of the destruction of political alternatives with an apparent paradox: How has Milosevic's Socialist Party been able to dominate the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government when it never won a majority of the votes cast in any election? The answer has two parts. First, the Socialists had a large social base that consistently delivered enough votes to make them the single most popular party in rump Yugoslavia. Citing a number of studies, Gordy shows that older, rural, and less-educated Serbs voted for Milosevic in highly disproportionate numbers throughout the 1990s. Second, because the Socialists' social base was never large enough to give them a plurality of seats in the parliament after 1990, their political domination also rested on their capacity to "co-opt elements...