“Serbs – the People that Ceases to Exist.” Bela Kuga, Demographic Anxieties, and Nationalism in Serbia

The Kosovo Obsession

How did nationalism hijack concerns about demographic developments? Or was it the other way round: did demographers maybe hijack nationalism? In her insightful book on “The ‘White Plague’ Among the ‘Serbs’” (“Bela kuga” među “Srbima”), anthropologist Rada Drezgić describes the process how media, experts and “pseudo-science” spread population panic in the 1980s. In a time when the public mood in Serbia became increasingly nationalistic, leading demographers added to the emerging obsession with Kosovo by highlighting the high population growth of the Albanian population.[14] Demographers spoke of a differentiated of bifurcative fertility development in Yugoslavia and Kosovo respectively, with some nationalities (especially the Albanians) still displaying high birth rates, whereas most of the country has already run through the demographic transition with fertility rates well below replacement level. In Kosovo, this development was compounded by emigration of the Slavic population in the 1980s, which Serbian nationalists framed as “genocide” and explained by the mistreatment of non-Albanians by the Kosovar authorities. In the late 1980s, the alarmist discourse of leading Serbian demographers, especially of academician Miloš Macura (who in the 1960s was a leading figure in the UN’s population department), was increasingly amplified by media reports about Serbia’s alleged double demographic crisis: low fertility in Serbia proper and high fertility – the highest in Europe at that time – among the Albanians in the Autonomous Province of Kosovo.[15] Demographers produced population projections that predicted the share of Albanians among Yugoslavia’s total population to reach 16% by 2030 (from 4.9% in 1961) and considered this a matter of concern.[16]

According to Drezgić, the demographers’ warnings about Kosovo’s “population explosion” were initially limited to expert circles, that is, until Slobodan Milošević’s advent to power in 1986.[17] One reason for that was the dominance of a liberal approach towards questions of population on the level of high politics. The right to choose was enshrined in Yugoslavia’s 1974 constitution and afterwards in the constitutions of the republics and autonomous provinces, it precluded direct state intervention into questions of procreation. In contrast to its communist neighbors to the east (Romania and Bulgaria), Yugoslavia did not pursue pro-natalist policies, neither did it take any measures to limit abortion (which for many women was the default family planning method). Into the late 1980s, the dominant family planning paradigm was that the state should guarantee conditions for “humane reproduction” and prioritize the welfare of mothers.[18] With Milošević this all changed: voices from the margins that had problematized Kosovo as a problem for Serbia became mainstream, once Milošević had discovered the mobilizing power of Kosovo. This was a dialectical process: those obsessed with Kosovo utilized the new importance attributed to their warnings to embolden their own status and gain an interpretative hegemony – the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and its infamous 1986 manifesto are a case in point –, while Milošević could exploit the authority of academics and intellectuals to legitimize his own agenda. The result was a hodgepodge of voices from academia, arts, media, and politics that created an increasingly self-referential rhetoric about Kosovo and rendered Kosovo a powerful explanation for a variety of “problems” intriguing Serbian nationalists.

Kosovo’s demographic development was one of the reasons in the growing uneasiness of Serbia’s elite about the constitutional arrangement of 1974 that gave wide-ranging autonomy to Kosovo and a seat on federal presidency. It served well to present the Albanians of Yugoslavia as backward or even worse, as counterrevolutionary. Concerns about the “differentiated” reproductive behavior of Serbs and Albanians – who in these discourses were always presented as monolithic blocs – marginalized almost all other demographic issues and became the problem to be solved by population policies in Serbia. “Balanced” demographic development – i.e., raising fertility in so-called “low-fertility” regions and reducing fertility in “high fertility” regions – was the catchword of the day. Exploiting growing political tensions between the governments in Belgrade and Prishtina, demographers made a push to transform the prevailing welfare-based population policy paradigm into a more directly interventionist (and discriminatory) one. Their fifteen minutes of fame came when in 1987, the parliament (skupština) of Serbia announced the elaboration of a set of measures to solve the “demographic problems of Kosovo.” The Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts took upon itself the task to provide scientific advice and in February 1988, organized a conference on the “Problems of the Policy of Population Renewal in Serbia.” Academician Miloš Macura, Serbia’s preeminent demographer, provided the position paper to be discussed at the conference.[19]

This proved to be a low point in the politicization of demography in Serbia. Serb demographers and other speakers did not mince their words and denigrated the Kosovar Albanians. Macura highlighted that in Kosovo, the population was differentiated not only by ethnicity, language, religion, but also demography. High population growth of the Albanians puts pressure on the other nationalities. This “explosive demographic process,” which none has so far tried to slow down, enjoys the “moral support by secessionist ideology which rests on ideas of national exclusivity and the slogan of an ethnically clean Kosovo.” Macura deplored that the “demographic expansion of the Albanians” and the “demographic dispersion of all other populations” have so far been a political taboo.[20] The sole Kosovo-Albanian voice at the conference, Musa Limani, dismissed Macura’s position as unacceptable, unscientific and non-Marxist. According to him, not high fertility but the lack of economic progress was Kosovo’s main problem. The demographic behavior of its population was commensurate to its level of development. Furthermore, demographic transition among the Albanians had already begun. Limani criticized Serb media for their alarmist and inflammatory language about Kosovo-Albanian fertility.[21] This was a courageous stance – speaker after speaker blasted him for that. One accused Kosovo politicians and intellectuals to pursue an “irrational population policy” because of their “obscure national aims”, which lead their own people into destitution while asking the rest of Yugoslavia to “pay the bills” and ignoring their “well-meaning advice.”[22] One speaker criticized the head of Kosovo’s family planning council, a professor of law at the University of Prishtina, for having five children.

A 1992 publication by the Center for Demographic Research in Belgrade on the “Demographic Problems and Population Policy of Kosovo and Metohija” reiterated these claims and did not include any voice from Prishtina.[23] It stressed the need for state policies to reduce population growth in Kosovo, allegedly for its own sake. The volume used a clearly discriminatory and alarmist language, for example describing the demographic behavior of the Albanian population as “irrational and deviant”, “disturbed”, and “expansive” – a framing that suggested urgent intervention. The study projected Kosovo’s population to reach more than four million people in 2050 if there was no change. Culture and nationalism were said to be the main reason for the Albanians’ high fertility rate. The fact that Kosovo had practically lost its autonomy in 1989 and the Albanian majority was facing political repression was not mentioned once.[24] Such publications amplified Serbian fears of Albanians, who were portrayed as expansionist, while the Serbian nation was said to be on its way to disappearance.[25] The fact that most Albanians are Muslims could only strengthen these fears.

Demographic knowledge, models, and projections became part and parcel of the Serbian nationalistic-revanchist discourse on Kosovo. Vuksan Cerović presented the reproductive behavior of Albanians as part of their “counterrevolutionary” efforts, undermining socialism and detaching Kosovo from Europe.[26] In his view, this was a deliberate plot against Serbia: “The demographic expansion (…) creates the conditions for future deviant and excessive situations, for the growth of nationalism and separatism and pressure on the Serbs and Montenegrins to leave the homes of their grandfathers.”[27] By 2030, Cerović quotes from demographic predictions, Kosovo might have more inhabitants than Serbia proper. On top of that, “excessive” fertility prevents economic development and reproduces poverty, despite the large sums of money allocated to Kosovo’s development. Nonetheless, there is no family planning in Kosovo, complains the author.[28] Macura, in a volume on Kosovo’s past and present, characterized the “natality problem” as one of the “more serious and far-reaching” ones.[29] He reiterates his stance – which mirrored international debates of the 1960s and 1970s about the connection between demography and development, in which he had participated – that natality needs to be reduced first before economic development can kick in (and not the other way round, as claimed by Kosovar demographers).[30]