ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the role played by nationalism in the pan-Balkan reality show To Sam Ja (That’s Me). The program is a “transnational” reality show that attempts to re-connect and integrate the former Yugoslav republics after the wars. Of interest to this chapter is the way the show, caught up in the shifting currents of post-socialist nationalism, channels these into what might be described as a form of commercial nationalism. Towards the end of the 1980s and the early 1990s, when the nationalisms of
all the republics of the former Yugoslavia escalated, each community re-activated or re-created national television systems in order to reinforce a sense of national identity and difference. At the same time, however, the same nations experienced the growth of commercial broadcasting in the new post-socialist era. All seven new former Yugoslav nation-states, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro and Macedonia, have gone or continue to go through the process of transition from a centralized, socialist, state-run economy to a privatized, market-driven one. Politically, these new nation-states are also still involved in the project of national identity building, since few of the republics had the historical experience of being an independent nation-state. The new government broadcasting outlets in newly independent states focus on consolidating national identity and fostering socio-economic development. In this regard, they recall, albeit in dramatically reconfigured form, the nation-building project of Yugoslav state broadcasting, before the late 1980s, which had pursued the vexed project of building Yugoslav unity by downplaying a sense of national and ethnic belonging to its constituent republics. Television in the Balkans remains a central stage on which national identity is
portrayed, represented, and shaped, although the landscape is being dramatically transformed by the advent of commercial broadcasting.1 Amidst the different ways in which cultures connect and overlap in the Balkan region, national culture has emerged as a preeminent frame of reference.2 Verdery insists on the importance of state broadcasting in the Balkan region in crafting the ways in which the nation operates as “a symbol,” a “sorting device” and a “tool of
classification.” She argues that the nation maintains its importance as “an aspect of the political and symbolic/ideological order and also of the world of social interaction and feeling.”3 These nation-states are attempting to make themselves over, in other words, so as to fit within the Western elite club of countries. Even as these nations seek to participate in the formation of a pan-European sense of shared identity, they are working to create bulwarks of nationalism.4
