Abstract
The inspiration for the following research arose from an identified ambivalence regarding the question of how relevant ethnic belonging – being Bosniak, being Croat, being Serb – is in everyday life of ex-Yugoslavian Viennese people. A qualitative analysis of narrative interviews as well as participant observations on Vienna’s Ottakringer Straße, a neighbourhood highly frequented by immigrants from the former Yugoslavia and their descendants, indicates that ethnicity indeed matters, particularly when it comes to questions of partner choice. The research, however, also reveals that there are further, intersecting boundaries encompassing or dividing the ‘ex-Yugoslavian community’: In light of being othered by the Austrian majority society and defined as ‘incomplete self’ Maria Todorova, i.e. as representatives of a sphere between the own and the foreign, educationally alienated young adults across ethnic boundaries notably celebrate the culture of ‘turbo folk’ on Ottakringer Straße – a lifestyle that emphasises their own ‘glamour and passion’ as opposed to Austrian ‘bleakness’. Therewith they reinforce the image of the ‘Balkan Other’. Simultaneously, ‘ex-Yugoslavian’ Viennese with higher education levels exhibit a substantial need to not only distinguish themselves from turbo folk and (night-)life on Ottakringer Straße, but also from the image of the ‘Balkan Other’. By emphasising their own ‘more sophisticated’ taste, they express their social position in terms of a specific lifestyle and set themselves apart from the ‘uneducated and common immigrants’. Hence, the analysis shows that, with regard to the ‘ex-Yugoslavian communities’ in Vienna, different symbolic boundaries are at work: the ethnic boundaries – (re-)constructed and (re-)enforced by the wars in the former Yugoslavia – the ‘Balkanised’ symbolic boundaries between ex-Yugoslavian minorities and the Austrian majority as well as the milieu-specific symbolic boundaries within the community itself.
Introduction
‘Wien oida, Beč oida’ is a slogan created by Kid Pex, an Austrian rapper of Croatian origin. The Viennese expression ‘Oida’ (in standard German: ‘Alter’) is similar to ‘dude’ and ‘Beč’ is the Slavic name for Vienna (in German: Wien). Over the past several years, the slogan has become iconic. With its conflation of different languages, dialects and slang, it has its finger on the pulse of the times and mirrors the life of many Viennese adolescents and young adults. There is a broad consensus in the literature that people are increasingly living in social worlds that are stretched between, or dually located in, physical places and communities in two or more nation-states […] the multi-local life-world presents a wider, even more complex set of conditions that affect the construction, negotiation and reproduction of social identities. (Vertovec, 2001: 578)
This paper’s author leads an ongoing research project that focuses on analysing identity constructions and the structures of belonging in Bosnian diaspora(s) – Bosniaks, 1 Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Serbs – living in Vienna. According to the project’s initial presupposition, wartime, post-war and migration constitute a very particular context, within which Viennese Bosnians must maintain a positive self-image and (re-)construct their identities. Using a hermeneutical analysis of in-depth interviews conducted with Bosnian Viennese of different ethnic allegiances, the research examines how the experience of the Bosnian war in the 1990s, as well as the experience of migration, ‘co-shape’ identity and with it the perception of others. It aims to reconstruct the individual’s social positioning, the symbolic boundaries characterising their lifeworld as well as their sense of belonging. Thus far, during the research, a notable ambivalence has appeared: Without being explicitly asked about the relevance of ethnicity in their lives, 2 interviewees frequently assert that their ethnic belonging – i.e. being a Bosniak, being a Croat, being a Serb – is widely insignificant in everyday life. They state that there are strong bonds with people from the former Yugoslavia in general (‘sa našima’) that are distinct from bonds with ‘normal Austrians’, as a few interviewees describe, and that the ethnic affiliation of ‘our people’ is not of any importance. However, in other cases, a cursory analysis of the conducted biographical interviews reveals that the respondents’ primary social circles – family as well as closest friends – are ethnically largely homogeneous.
This paper aims to more closely examine this specific ambivalence and to shed light on the question of how important ethnic boundaries are in everyday life of ex-Yugoslavian immigrants and their descendants living in Vienna. It seeks to illuminate the structures of in-group/outgroup-differentiations, i.e. how ethnic and other forms of symbolic boundaries are drawn in various situations and how different kinds of symbolic boundaries relate to one another. To analyse the processes of boundary making, it seemed beneficial to focus on a specific Viennese neighbourhood, which is highly frequented by immigrants from the former Yugoslavia or one of its successor states and/or their descendants. One of the most well-known ‘ex-Yugoslavian’ quarters in Vienna is the Balkanmeile or Balkanstraße.
The Balkanmeile is the moniker for Ottakringer Straße, the main street of Vienna’s sixteenth district, Ottakring. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Ottakring, a typical working-class quarter, was Vienna’s most populous district (Statistik Austria, 2001), and there was already a strong segregation between the city’s bourgeois and aristocratic centre and the peripheral districts. In the 1960s and 1970s, many guest workers, particularly from the former Yugoslavia, moved into substandard dwellings in and around Ottakringer Straße. Additionally, in the 1990s, many refugees from Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina settled in this area. This accelerated the neighbourhood’s transformation: Many immigrants went into business and opened shops, cafés and restaurants in abandoned commercial premises along the street. Since then, Ottakringer Straße has become a place where people both live and work (Krasny, 2015: 128). On weekends, the street changes into a nightlife area with more than 30 nightclubs and cafés. Largely due to its night scene, the street’s transformation has been given expression in the (unofficial) name: the Balkanmeile (Dika and Jeitler, 2016; Krasny, 2011).
Due to its specific research design, i.e. to gain insights into the symbolic boundaries characterising this specific neighbourhood, the present paper not only focuses on immigrants from Bosnia-Herzegovina (and their descendants), but also on those from Croatia and Serbia. 3 This requires differentiating between the nation state from which people come, i.e. their national origin – being from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia or Serbia – and their ethnic allegiance – being Bosniak, Croat (from Croatia or from Bosnia) or Serb (from Serbia, Bosnia or Croatia).
Further, it examines practices and processes of boundary making and the differentiation between ‘us’ and ‘them’ by combining narrative interviews conducted within the aforementioned project with an analysis of six additional interviews with (former) residents, businesspersons and local creatives of Ottakringer Straße (from Bosnia-Herzegovina, plus Serbia and Croatia) as well as participant observations (including conversations with residents, visitors and businesspeople) and by analysing the neighbourhood’s media coverage.
According to Wimmer, it is beneficial to focus on non-ethnic units when analysing processes of ethnic boundary making: Using non-ethnic units of observation and an analytical perspective that does not take the existence and relevance of ethnic communities for granted provides rich insights into the boundary making dynamics in contemporary immigrant societies. Studying everyday forms of group formation from the empirical ground up also helps to correct for the exaggerated constructivism that characterizes much academic writing on immigrant incorporation in Europe. (Wimmer, 2008: 113)
Before proceeding to the results, the paper elucidates the ex-Yugoslavian population in Vienna, including results from existing research on ex-Yugoslavian diaspora(s) worldwide. This is followed by insights into the study’s theoretical background as well as the data and the methods applied.
Ex-Yugoslavians in Vienna: Heterogeneous homogeneity
The first phase of immigration from Yugoslavia to Austria took place between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s and was initiated by the Agreement on Labour Recruitment with the former Yugoslavia in 1966. By 1971, 93,337 Yugoslavian citizens lived in Austria (in 1961, 4565) (Fassmann and Reeger, 2008: 11). Despite the Austrian government not having planned for guest workers to remain in Austria – a rotational work plan and short-term contracts should guarantee their return to their countries of origin – many decided to stay in the country and settled there with their families. In 1991, 197,886 people with a Yugoslavian passport lived in Austria (Fassmann and Reeger, 2008: 11). Socio-demographically, the vast majority have been working class, typically coming from rural areas and with educationally alienated upbringings (Franz, 2011: 153). Below-average incomes and ethnic discrimination in the housing market resulted in their concentration in urban neighbourhoods with low-quality dwellings, like Vienna’s sixteenth district, Ottakring (Franz, 2011: 152; Kohlbacher and Reeger, 2006). Over time, both an informal and formal, multi-ethnic community structure has developed.
In the early 1990s, things changed: the violent disruption of the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia and its ethnic mobilisation have had a lasting impact on the ex-Yugoslavian diasporas worldwide (Colic-Preisker, 2006; Halilovich et al., 2018; Valenta and Ramet, 2011). In Vienna, no Yugoslavian associations or cultural clubs survived the Yugoslavian disintegration (Waldrauch and Sohler, 2004), while the city’s informal multi-ethnic ties also vanished (Franz, 2011: 153).
Between 1991 and 1995, 13,000 refugees from Croatia and approximately 90,000 refugees (Valenta and Ramet, 2011: 4) from Bosnia-Herzegovina sought shelter in Austria. After the war ended in 1995, most refugees from Croatia returned, whereas a large majority of the Bosnian refugees stayed in Austria and were granted permanent residence status in 1998 (Hageboutros, 2016; Halilovich et al., 2018). They blended in, at least statistically, with the large number of guest workers who had already been in Austria since the 1960s or 1970s. In contrast to guest workers, the refugees of the 1990s, however, belonged to different social classes, i.e. they had different educational backgrounds and came from rural as well as urban areas. Despite most of the higher-educated refugees experiencing a social decline (Franz, 2005: 56; Halilovich et al., 2018: 97), they contributed to a higher socio-demographic heterogeneity within and a higher educational level compared to other ex-Yugoslavian immigrants. This development is further enhanced by the fact that today, many people, most of all from Bosnia-Herzegovina, immigrate to study in Austria (Halilovich et al., 2018: 95–96).
Nevertheless, significant socio-demographic differences between the ex-Yugoslavian diaspora and the Austrian majority society persist. Compared to the Austrian population without migration backgrounds, people of ex-Yugoslavian origin have significantly lower educational qualifications (Medien-Servicestelle. Neue ÖsterreicherInnen, 2017). Even second-generation immigrants are significantly underrepresented both in higher educational institutions (Weiss, 2007) and also in many social fields like politics, journalism, arts or established cultural institutions. Yet, the official Austrian narrative portrays guest workers, their descendants and also former refugees as a success story for a state system and its integration process (Franz, 2011). Today, ex-Yugoslavian Austrians are largely accepted and well-integrated into the labour market. Even so, while Austrian Serbs are even courted by the right-wing Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) (Filzmaier et al., 2015: 31; Permoser et al., 2010: 1473), the Austrian population with a Bosniak/Muslim background is affected by the country’s general Islamophobic atmosphere. This is notable, as comparing unemployment and labour force participation rates clearly demonstrates that people from Bosnia (mostly with a Muslim background, i.e. Bosniaks) are best integrated into the Austrian labour market, followed by Croats (Statistik Austria, 2018a: 58). However, pre-existing concerns about Islamisation created by the populist right were exacerbated by the influx of predominantly Muslim refugees into Austria during the 2015–2016 crisis. This has intensified and affected the perception of the country’s Bosnian Muslim population (Rosenberger and Matters, 2015).
While there has been much research on ex-Yugoslavian migrants, the focus is often either on one specific ethnic group (Bock-Luna, 2007; Colic-Preisker, 2006) or on a specific country of origin (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia) (Franz, 2005, 2011; Halilovich, 2012). The former usually takes the ethnic division for granted, whereas the latter typically does not reflect on the potential relevance of ethnic boundaries. This article, however, aims to discuss the ethnic boundaries (being a Bosniak, Croat or Serb) in relation to other forms of symbolic boundaries, which particularly includes the boundary between ex-Yugoslavians and the Austrian majority. It addresses the question of which role ethnic boundaries play in this specific context of (post)war and migration, of former enmity, and life in minority settings.
Migration research repeatedly argues that the term ‘identity’ should be replaced by the concept of belonging (e.g. Anthias, 2002; Simonsen, 2018), since the ‘heuristic potential’ of identity should be considered at least as disputable (Anthias, 2002: 492). As the following theoretical considerations will show, if anchored within the social constructivist sociology of knowledge, identity can still be considered as a useful term.
Social construction and symbolic boundaries
The social constructivism approach, as developed by Berger and Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality (1966), provides the theoretical foundation for the analysis. The authors base their theory on a fundamental (dialectical) proposition: ‘Society is a human product. Society is an objective reality. Man is a social product’ (Berger and Luckmann 1966: 61). Working from this assumption, they systematically address the question of how to understand the relation between individual and society. According to their approach, ‘objective realities’ are socially constructed within the processes of institutionalisation and legitimation (Berger and Luckmann, 1966: chapter 2) and individually internalised within the process of socialisation (Berger and Luckmann, 1966: chapter 3). During this socialisation process, the individual not only learns how others see the world, they learn that this is how the world simply is, and, who they are (Berger and Luckmann, 1966: 159). Berger and Luckmann’s concept of identity distinguishes itself from other approaches by avoiding one central pitfall of identity research: Brubaker and Cooper (2000: 2), for instance, note that identity ‘is too ambiguous, too torn between “hard” and “soft” meanings, essentialist connotations and constructivist qualifiers, to serve well the demands of social analysis’. While ‘hard’ conceptions emphasise a fundamental consistency and essentialise or reify identity, constructivist approaches oppose this essentialism and accentuate the social origin, the preliminary and processual character of identity. Whereas the former must be considered as scientifically untenable, the latter may be ‘too weak to do useful theoretical work’ (Brubaker and Cooper, 2000: 11). Berger and Luckmann’s assumption of a ‘fundamental social dialectic’ (Berger and Luckmann, 1966: 61), however, dissolves the dilemma, since it conceives social reality and with it, identity, as a human product as well as ‘objective facticity’ (Berger and Luckmann, 1966: 159). It connotes ‘subjective meaning’ (Weber, 1984) as well as being a ‘social fact’ (Durkheim, 1984). In other words, despite being socially constructed, identity must not be considered as completely volatile. Mutatis mutandis, these theoretical assumptions also apply to what is commonly denoted as ‘collective identity’.
The connection between the individual self and a person’s collective identity is aptly described by Norbert Elias. He understands identity as a balance between ‘I’ and ‘we’. To him, there cannot be an I-identity without a we-identity (Elias, 2001). Which component is stronger depends on the specific socio-historical context. He points out that ‘a certain stage in a process of state formation can favour individualisation, the greater emphasis on the I-identity of the individual person and the detachment of that person from the traditional groupings’ (Elias, 2001: 179). In times of crises, however, the balance can shift towards the we-group that appears as a ‘survival unit’ for the individual, ‘a protection unit on which depends their physical and social security’ (Elias, 2001: 208). The we-group does not only provide security; it is also a source for recognition. Along which dimension the we-identity is constituted – e.g., family, nation, ethnicity, religion, class, gender or even humanity – is, however, context-dependent.
Capturing this context dependency requires, as for instance Brubaker (2002) and Wimmer (2013) point out, to not treat social groups as given entities. Social analysis should rather focus on the dynamics of the construction and maintenance of symbolic and – as the case may be – social boundaries between groups (Alba, 2005; Barth, 1969; Lamont and Molnár, 2002; Tilly, 2009; Wimmer, 2008).
Lamont and Molnar (2002) define symbolic boundaries as ‘conceptual distinctions made by social actors to categorise objects, people, practices, and even time and space. They are tools by which individuals and groups struggle over and come to agree upon definitions of reality’ (Lamont and Molnár, 2002: 168). Social boundaries, on the other hand, ‘are objectified forms of social differences manifested in unequal access to and unequal distribution of resources (material and nonmaterial) and social opportunities’ (Lamont and Molnár, 2002: 168). To Lamont (1992: 174–176), symbolic boundaries are a necessary but not sufficient condition for the emergence of social boundaries . As interpretation patterns, they must be widely accepted before social boundaries of, for example, ethnic segregation or discrimination can appear.
Symbolic boundaries can divide (and therewith define) not only ethnic categories (Alba, 2005; Bail, 2008; Barth, 1969; Wimmer, 2008, 2013), but also gender (Epstein, 1992; do Amaral Madureira, 2012) or classes (Jarness, 2017; Lamont, 1992). In particular, regarding nationality, race or ethnicity, which Max Weber defines as ‘a subjective belief in […] common descent’ (Weber, 1968: 389), people tend to conceive social constructions as natural givens; they tend to a primordialist point of view (Brubaker et al., 2004; Geertz, 1996). Since they are easier to abstract (Elias, 2001; Gil-White, 2001; Hirschfeld, 1996), national or ethnic boundaries remain to Lamont and Aksartova as ‘the chief mechanism for separating “us” from “them”’ (Lamont and Aksartova, 2002: 2). Nevertheless, ethnic boundaries are not always relevant or politically salient. In some contexts, boundaries are characterised by an ambiguity regarding the question of belonging to an in-group, while they are unambiguous in others (Alba, 2005). Social analysis should focus considerably on the question of ‘how and why ethnicity matters in certain societies and contexts but not in others’ (Wimmer, 2013: 2).
Various scholars have addressed how boundaries are constructed or how people negotiate symbolic boundaries (Alba and Nee, 1997; Lamont and Bail, 2007; Zolberg and Woon, 1999). Wimmer (2008) systematically summarised the relevant literature and identified five ‘elementary strategies of ethnic boundary making’ (Wimmer, 2008: 986): (1) shifting boundaries through expansion, e.g. the endeavour of the former Yugoslavian political regime to create ‘Yugoslavians’ out of i.e. Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims; (2) shifting boundaries through contraction, e.g. the endeavour of the nationalist political leaders to recreate Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks out of Yugoslavians in the 1990s; (3) normative inversion, which ‘does not target the location of the boundary but the hierarchical ordering of the ethnic groups’ (Wimmer, 2008: 988); (4) repositioning, whereby an actor changes its position ‘within an existing hierarchical boundary system’ (Wimmer, 2008: 988); (5) and finally, the strategy of blurring boundaries, which aims to overcome a respective dimension of boundary drawing, like ethnicity.
Within the context of these theoretical considerations, the following section focuses on the reflections upon symbolic boundaries in the Viennese Ottakringer Straße neighbourhood.
Material and methods
To analyse the symbolic boundaries that arise in ex-Yugoslavian communities, the paper draws, for one, on narrative interviews conducted within the aforementioned project about Bosnian diasporas. At the time of this paper’s submission, the project data encompasses 20 narrative interviews (Loch and Rosenthal, 2002) with ‘Viennese Bosnians’ – first-generation immigrants and their descendants, former refugees as well as ‘guest workers’ – of different ethnic allegiances (i.e. Bosniaks, Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Serbs). The interviews took place between May 2016 and May 2018 and lasted between 1.5 and 5.5 hours. They were conducted partly in German and partly in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. For the purpose of this paper, six additional interviews with (former) residents, businesspersons and local Ottakringer Straße creatives were conducted (two Bosniaks, two Croats and two Serbs). They lasted between 1.5 and 3 hours. Although the following only cites examples from three selected interviews, all the conducted interviews have been considered within the qualitative analysis. The narrative interviews have been interpreted with a sequence-analytical procedure based on the objective hermeneutics methodology. The primary interest is not the question of what people are talking about but rather the question of how they talk about specific content and in which ways they express them. Furthermore, this approach does not ask about the speaker’s intention, but rather for the ‘objective’ meaning of the text. The key strength of the objective hermeneutics approach is its capacity to uncover this ‘how’ – the structures or ‘strategies’ for coping with specific challenges that people usually deploy unconsciously and that therefore cannot be ascertained simply through direct questions (Oevermann et al., 1987; Wernet, 2013).
The first step analyses the objective data from an interview, i.e. a person’s social background (Oevermann et al., 1980). The second step involves the sequential fine analysis 4 of the beginning of every interview. Subsequently, further text units are selected by using a maximum variation sampling. Saturation is reached when further text unit analysis does not significantly change the structure hypothesis.
The interview analyses have been combined with neighbourhood participant observations. Between February 2018 and July 2018, I visited Ottakringer Straße on a regular basis. During the day, I went into shops, cafés or spent time walking along the street. During the night, I visited pubs, clubs and concerts. On these occasions, I engaged in numerous conversations with residents, local businesspeople and visitors – in German as well as in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. After every visit, I wrote detailed field notes to document the observable realities and my perceptions of them.
During my visits to Ottakringer Straße, I also talked to people without any migration background. Within these conversations, their specific perceptions of the ‘Balkanmeile’ became apparent. In order to capture the ‘Austrian’ perspective on the neighbourhood more systematically, I chose to consider the neighbourhood’s media coverage. In this case, the perspective is not from the ‘inside’ or asking how people with origins in the former Yugoslavia ‘make’ symbolic boundaries, but rather investigates how symbolic boundaries are drawn by the Austrian majority, i.e. here, I proceed from ‘outside’ and analyse the ‘discourse about minorities’ (Wodak, 2008: 54–55). I focused exclusively on the Austrian media landscape between February 2018 and July 2018, and these data have also been analysed by focusing on the question of how content is expressed (Oevermann et al., 1987).
Symbolic boundaries in an ex-Yugoslavian neighbourhood: Results and discussion
(Ir-)relevance of ethnic boundaries
During the wars in former Yugoslavia, ethnicity or ethnic belonging became the most substantial component of the self. This reduction of one’s own individual identity to ethnicity is still symptomatic for the whole region. The disintegration of Yugoslavia, however, also took place in Vienna: processes of nationalisation and ethnicisation have disrupted the multi-ethnic structure of the Yugoslavian diaspora – the formal ones, like associations (Waldrauch and Sohler, 2004), as well as the informal. One interviewee (44), the son of a (Croatian) guest worker family and born in Vienna, provides a common description of how the 1990s unfolded: Until the age of 14 or 15, I actually did not know who was Croatian, Serbian, or Bosnian. We had always been together. We were Yugoslavs. We had a red passport and we knew about Tito. That’s it. That’s what we knew about down there. And then the war came and everything, even here in Vienna, fell apart.
To date, ‘South Slavic’ associations in Vienna are primarily organised along ethnic lines (Halilovich et al., 2018: 94). As the collected data – the participant observation as well as the interviews – suggest, there are, however, multifaceted relationships between people of different ethnic belonging on the informal level. The critical connecting elements are, according to the data, the same language and the similarity between the languages respectively, or, what people refer to as a ‘similar mentality’. The interviewee cited above continued: This was the case until after the end of war. 1995, 1996, 1998, and then, all at once, all of this vanished and all of us continued to go out together. We, here in Vienna, decided not to pay attention to what was going on down there […] We have so many things in common. There have been plenty of us at the university. We have somehow been a microcosm of Yugoslavia, even during the war. […] To this date, my circle of friends is wildly mixed. There are many Serbs and Croats and of course Bosniaks. in situations where there is competition between different reality-defining agencies, all sorts of secondary-group relationships with the competitors may be tolerated, as long as there are firmly established primary-group relationships within which one reality is ongoingly reaffirmed against the competitors. (Berger and Luckmann, 1966: 172) Having a partner with the same ethnic background and the same experiences makes it so much easier. I don’t have to discuss my values; I don’t have to explain things, my perspective. My parents wanted me to marry a Croat woman. They used to say that it is going to be easier for me. […] I have actually married a Croatian woman. And they were right. You can marry in your church. But it is not just about the religion: It is about the common past and about the kids […], you can baptize them; it’s hard to explain.
Beyond questions of partner choice and marriage, the analysis indicates that ethnic belonging merely becomes relevant when people occupy themselves with political occurrences in Bosnia, Croatia or Serbia. The Croatian Viennese describes this situation aptly within a ‘condensed narration’: There is an Albanian guy, sitting with a Croat and a Serb. They work together or they live on the same block. And everything is fine. I join them and offer them some rakija, which they enthusiastically accept. And they ask me where I am from. And everything’s good. Then they go home and watch the Albanian, the Croatian, the Serbian news, and everything changes. They get sucked into the conflicts between the Serbs and the Albanians about Kosovo, or into the conflict between the Croats and the Serbs in Bosnia. They get sucked into all this hate. If only we wouldn’t have all this stuff down there.
A similar pattern is observable within the context of sport events – like the 2018 FIFA World Cup of football. During the fieldwork for this article, a number of football-related incidents occurred on Ottakringer Straße. Right after the game between Serbia and Switzerland on 22 June 2018, for instance, the festive atmosphere amongst the Serbian fans on Ottakringer Straße became a riot. Provoked by the fact that Swiss players of Kosovan descent scored both goals (Granit Xhaka and Xherdan Shakiri), who, additionally, celebrated their scores with the ‘eagle gesture’, a symbol used by (nationalist) ethnic Albanians, some (exclusively young male) Serbian visitors to Ottakringer Straße become aggressive. They vandalised and blocked the street, yelling ‘Knife, Wire, Srebrenica’, a fascist slogan glorifying the genocide in Srebrenica, and some attacked the police. A few nights later, on 7 July 2018, Ottakringer Straße was again inflamed. During the celebration, following the Croatian national team’s match against Russia, nationalist and fascist symbols were omnipresent. Nazi salutes, symbols of the Croatian fascist Ustasha movement – which are forbidden in Croatia – and End-Sieg tags overshadowed the celebrations. Ismer (2011: 548), among others, identifies ‘football as a central domain in which nation-related rituals including intense collective emotions are frequently observable’. He points out that the ‘heightened affective arousal can support the embodiment and actualisation of cognitive and affective contents of national identity’ (Ismer, 2011: 560).
By considering these incidents on Ottakringer Straße, their media coverage as well as their perception by autochthon Austrians, further symbolic boundaries become apparent. The media coverage about Ottakringer Straße during the World Cup was characterised by an ambivalent process of ‘othering’: It ranged from emphasising crime, violence, riots and danger on one hand and the very special festive atmosphere on the other – often within the same article. This fluctuation reflects some characteristics of the symbolic boundaries between the Austrian majority society and the ex-Yugoslavian minority.
Being othered and othering Oneself – Balkanism and ‘turbo folk’
The Balkan other as the ‘incomplete self’
The symbolic boundary between the Austrian majority society and the ex-Yugoslavian immigrants and their descendants already finds its expression in the unofficial denomination of Ottakringer Straße: the Balkanmeile. Balkanmeile is a highly ambivalent term, which fluctuates between holding positive and negative attributions – between the positive stereotypes of a consumable Balkan (e.g. nightlife, gastronomy, music) and the negative stereotypes of crime and danger (Krasny, 2015: 128). In her book Imagining the Balkan, Todorova (2009) addresses this very ambivalence. The ‘Balkanisation’, she states, ‘not only had come to denote the parcelization of large and viable political units but also had become a synonym for a reversion to the tribal, the backward, the primitive, the barbarian’ (Todorova, 2009: 3). According to Slavoj Žižek (1996), it is the Western gaze that transforms the Balkans into a ‘mythical spectacle of eternal primordial passions, of the vicious cycle of hate and love, in contrast to the decent and anaemic life in the West’. These perceptions about the Balkans, and the Balkanmeile that accompany them, are mirrored in the media coverage of Ottakringer Straße, including the comments section of online papers, in social media (e.g. Twitter, Facebook) as well as within the conversations with autochthon Austrians during the participant observations.
Many of the Austrians I spoke with during my participatory observations as well as the online commentators describe Ottakringer Straße as ‘loud’, ‘savage’ and even ‘dangerous’. The behaviour of the football fans during the FIFA World Cup – the hooligans, but also the peaceful fans, who celebrated on the street – were classified as ‘crazy’, ‘heedless’ and ‘expensive’. Comments often refer to police operations costs (‘When they can celebrate, they can also pay for the police operation’) or to the ‘fact’ that the ‘troublemakers’ are only ‘guests’ – they were not considered as belonging to Austria – who do not know how to behave. Cutting social benefits and immediate expulsion are regularly expressed demands from online commenters. Journalists, for instance, denote Ottakringer Straße as ‘command centre’ (Kommandozentrale) of passionate Croatian football fans (Die Presse, 2018) or juxtapose ‘Croatian fans’ and ‘armed police-forces’ (‘Kroatische Fans: Polizei rüstet auf’) (Marits, 2018) and therewith establish a link between a military or police operation and the public viewing of a football match. Others, however, were enthusiastic about the ‘festive atmosphere’, the ‘football party’ and the excitement. Many emphasised that the ‘Yugos (still) know how to celebrate’ (Gaigg and Hagen, 2018). This also clearly indicates that Balkanism is omnipresent when it comes to an (e)valuation of ex-Yugoslavian groups; symbolic boundaries between the Austrian majority society and people of Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian descent are critically characterised by the classification of the ‘Balkan Other’ as ‘incomplete self’ (Todorova, 2009: 17). According to Todorova, the Balkans, along with its people, are represented as ‘semi-developed, semi-colonial, semi-civilised and semi-oriental’ (Todorova, 2009: 194). As an incomplete self, the ‘Balkan people’ represent a sphere between the own and the foreign. They are not complete strangers (since they somehow belong to Austria – especially to Vienna and are therefore considered the best-integrated Others), but neither are they full-fledged members of the Austrian in-group.
The genuine Austrian perceptions of the ‘Balkan Other’ could be examined in more detail by, for instance, hermeneutically analysing ‘protocols of life practice’ (e.g. in-depth interviews) of autochthon Austrians (Oevermann et al., 1987). In the following, this paper instead examines the other side of the boundary and elucidates the enquiry of if and how the addressed – i.e. people with origins in one of Yugoslavia’s successor states – (re-)construct the boundaries between an Austrian majority and the South Slavic minorities and how they – as the case may be – process being ‘Balkanised’.
The analysis of the interviews and participant observations in the Ottakringer Straße neighbourhood reveals that Ottakringer Straße or the ‘Balkanmeile’ is dominated by the social phenomenon of ‘turbo folk’. The data analysis clearly indicates that understanding the symbolic boundaries in and around Ottakringer Straße requires a closer look at this phenomenon, since turbo folk simultaneously seems to be a reason for Balkanisation and a reaction to it.
The connecting power of turbo folk … and its dividing force
Turbo folk is both a musical genre and a subculture or an attitude, a ‘style of life, a culture’ (Archer, 2012; Cvoro, 2014; Rasmussen, 2002; Vogel, 2017: 11). It originated in Serbia and became popular during the wars in the 1990s. In cultural studies, turbo folk is often denominated as the ‘soundtrack of the Serbian wars’ or as the ‘soundtrack of the Yugoslavian collapse’ (Vogel, 2017). It was closely linked to Serbian nationalism, xenophobia and war crimes. One of the most famous turbo folk singers, Svetlana Ražnatović (also known as Ceca), for instance, was married to Željko Ražnatović (also known as Arkan), a commander of the infamous Srpska dobrovoljačka garda paramilitary unit that was responsible for a vast number of war crimes committed in Bosnia. Within this context, it is especially remarkable that turbo folk has spread across the entire ex-Yugoslavian region since the end of the war (Baker, 2006: 283ff.; Cvoro, 2014) – and has taken hold of ex-Yugoslavian communities around the world (Archer, 2012). In other words, an originally nationalist and ethnocentric cultural phenomenon ultimately even contributes to an erosion of ethnic boundaries as it binds people of different ethnic belonging together.
Today, turbo folk is not primarily about war and the glorification of the Serbian nation. Rather, it is about love and sex – in a considerably pornographic way; it is about revenge, drugs and alcohol. Turbo folk status symbols represent symbols of a consumption culture, e.g. expensive cars, short skirts and high heels (Vogel, 2017) or in the words of Baker, ‘quick enrichment, conspicuous consumption, masculinity realised through violence, and femininity realised through sexual availability’ (Baker, 2007: 140). The nightlife on Ottakringer Straße, in fact, is turbo folk (Dika, 2011). One reason for turbo folk’s success in Austria seems to be a keen desire – or even a need for young people with origins in one of Yugoslavia’s successor states – to distinguish themselves from the Austrian majority, which was often described as ‘boring’, ‘unstylish’ or ‘drab’ within the conversations held during the participant observations; or in the words of Žižek, as ‘decent and anaemic’. Women and men have different roles to fulfil, i.e. they face different rights, duties, behavioural norms and expectations; and only if you meet these expectations, are you a ‘real man’ or a ‘real woman’. Here, again, young people with ex-Yugoslavian origins distinguish themselves from the ‘Švabos’ – the masculine women and effeminate men of the majority society. It is reasonable to assume that this is also a reaction to the reality of being othered, which can be described as a ‘normative inversion’ that targets the hierarchical ordering of groups according to Wimmer (2008: 988). Simultaneously, however, it is a reproduction of the symbolic boundaries drawn by the majority society; a reproduction of the images of the ex-Yugoslavian community, which are held by the Austrian society and which are characterised by the phenomenon Todorova describes as Balkanism (Archer, 2012: 192). Furthermore, turbo folk seems to be a ‘placeholder for many debates not conducted: about gender, about nation, about culture’, and perhaps – most importantly – ‘about war and the question of guilt’ (Vogel, 2017: 108). For ‘diasporic adolescents’ in particular, turbo folk offers a ‘new idea of belonging and distinction’ (Vogel, 2017: 108). In this sense, turbo folk contributes to an expansion of symbolic boundaries (Wimmer, 2008: 986). There is some evidence to suggest that the adolescents who consume turbo folk never became acquainted with other cultural representations of what they are defining as their region of origin. Analogous to the majority society, they consider it as a representation of their descent: ‘Our music/culture/mentality’, ‘it is in our blood’ or ‘that is, what we are’ were quite common opinions/statements made by visitors to Ottakringer Straße.
The analysis of the interviews as well as the participant observations, however, clearly suggests that Ottakringer Straße – at least by night – is almost exclusively frequented by adolescents and young adults from an educationally alienated, working-class environment. Within the interviews conducted with university graduates, artists or other members of the upper-middle class, a huge need was exhibited to differentiate themselves from the turbo folk phenomenon and its accompanying Ottakringer Straße nightlife. By emphasising their own ‘more sophisticated’ taste in, e.g. music and fashion, they express their social position in terms of a specific lifestyle and distinguish themselves from less privileged members of society (Bourdieu, 2000), e.g. ‘the children of former guest workers’, ‘the working class’ and ‘the ones who grew up without real culture’. In her analysis of the inclusive and exclusive moments in the construction of national musical identity in Croatia, Baker analyses, among others, the nationalist as well as the ‘cosmopolitan’ resistance and counter-currents to the spread of turbo folk (Baker, 2007). This cosmopolitan resistance is most clearly mirrored in some of the conducted interviews. The Bosniak woman cited above points out: There is actually a differentiation within the community […], mostly regarding the educational background. It is a question of which cultural events one is visiting, or which music one is listening to. At family gatherings, I am also listening to folk music—but no turbo folk, never! I would never go to a concert or to a turbo folk nightclub. The old folk music, that’s different. I have to say that I have never socialised with those people on Ottakringer Straße, although I lived there for many years. I never went to the clubs, but rather spent my time with a smaller intellectual minority […] To put it bluntly: They have been listening to strange music; I have been reading books.
Thus, by connecting people of different ethnic origins, the ‘culture’ of turbo folk contributes – at least to a certain degree – to overcome nationalism or ethnic boundaries. Simultaneously, turbo folk is to be considered as a manifestation of the symbolic (and most likely the social) boundaries between different social milieus within the ‘group’ of immigrants from the former Yugoslavia (or one of its successor states).
Conclusion
The initial purpose of the research presented in this paper was the question of whether ethnic boundaries between Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs play an important role in the everyday life of ex-Yugoslavian immigrants and their descendants in Vienna and how ethnic and other forms of symbolic boundaries are drawn in various situations. The analysis revealed that – not least as a result of the experience of war – ethnicity still matters, primarily when it comes to formally institutionalised settings like marriage or diaspora organisation. In lesser institutionalised contexts, like socialising among coworkers or neighbourly relations, ethnicity remains largely insignificant. Thus, there seems to be a need for a formal cultural demarcation which, in fact, has only limited effects on the informal context. An exception is, however, antagonistically structured settings. For instance, when people bring up, or were confronted with, controversial political topics that usually remained silenced within interethnic encounters, like the political status of the Kosovo, conflicting ideas about the political structure of Bosnia-Herzegovina 5 or in the context of sport events. In any case, it becomes evident that ‘groupness is a variable, not a constant […which is] peaking during exceptional—but unsustainable—moments of collective effervescence’ (Brubaker, 2004: 4).
By focusing on the Ottakringer Straße neighbourhood (and its media coverage), however, further and more salient boundaries become apparent: the symbolic boundaries drawn by the Austrian majority society, which are characterised by features of ‘Balkanism’, i.e. a discourse that promotes a pejorative political and cultural stereotype of southeastern Europe within which the ‘Balkan’ and its people are seen as an ‘incomplete self’. These boundaries are being reinforced by parts of the ‘Balkan Others’. By following the culture of turbo folk, which conforms to many stereotypes of Balkanism, adolescents and young adults with origins in southeastern Europe contribute to a stabilisation of the boundaries between the Austrian majority and ex-Yugoslavian minorities. As the analysis shows, this outward demarcation is accompanied by an interethnic alliance of turbo folk proponents. That is, an originally nationalist and ethnocentric cultural phenomenon ultimately even contributes to an erosion of ethnic boundaries (or an expansion of symbolic boundaries) as it binds people of different ethnic belonging together. However, the analysis has further revealed that turbo folk does more than just connect people from different ex-Yugoslavian diasporas. Regarding the phenomenon of turbo folk, the symbolic boundaries between different social milieus within the ex-Yugoslavian diaspora emerge most clearly. To sum up, the analysis shows that, with regard to ‘ex-Yugoslavian communities’ in Vienna, different symbolic boundaries are at work: ethnic boundaries – (re-)constructed and (re-)enforced by the wars in the former Yugoslavia – ‘Balkanised’ symbolic boundaries between ex-Yugoslavian minorities and the Austrian majority as well as the milieu-specific symbolic boundaries within the community itself. Those diverse manifestations of symbolic boundaries only became apparent, first, by not defining in advance which social category is the most important one, and second, by taking the significance of the experience of war as well as migration and life in minority settings into account. In doing so, the paper contributes to a better sociological understanding of the self-perceptions of ex-Yugoslavian diasporas.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Leora Courtney-Wolfman for copyediting and the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive and useful suggestions on an earlier draft of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article is based on research funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF; T 779-G22).