Rethinking international intervention through coeval engagement: Non-formal youth education and the politics of improvement
Katarina Kušić
Rethinking international intervention through coeval engagement: Non-formal youth education and the politics of improvement
/core/cambridge-core/public/images/favicon.ico
Cambridge Core
Unemployment as a field of visibility

Moving beyond predefined fields of visibility in NFE required two steps: recognising (un)employability as an expanded field in which politics of improvement unfold, and then inquiring into its logics. The importance of unemployment is part of a larger reorientation of donors (and local actors that follow them) towards ‘employability’ as a policy field. As a young man working in a youth NGO lamented: everyone was ‘into employment’ these days, ‘even organisations that did sexual education are now employment experts!’Footnote 98 While this reorientation itself points to new ways in which subjects are incorporated into global flows of labour,Footnote 99 my encounter with (un)employment happened not in the context of projects overtly dedicated to employability as a policy field, but in political education and capacity building. Making sense of it thus requires transgressing predefined fields of visibility.

Even though the content of the courses I attended was political, and many were organised around ideological lines, many of the participants, in the words of one of my interviewees, were ‘expecting some kind of employment’ as a result. In interviews with people working in NFE, these expectations and the broader mood of struggles for employment were juxtaposed to the past in which political education was more ‘political’. The most dramatic comparisons referred to ‘suitcases of cash’ that were smuggled into the country while working to bring down Milošević and the highly political nature of civil society work in that era.Footnote 100 At other times, interviewees looked farther into socialism. A manager of a large NFE provider reflected:

Now, in relation to this non-formal education, this is very – since I am that generation from that socialism [ta neka generacija iz tog socijalizma], this non-formal education is not, how do I say, related to only this period. Because, especially, this part of political education was present in youth [party] organisation … We had, practically, a whole … a structure that did this. … So, this political socialisation is not a product of modern times, but simply, there was this political socialisation. I really … I often laugh when I see those programmes … and now, ‘how do you conduct a meeting’. We did all this 30 and more years ago.Footnote 101

This historical consciousness challenges the ‘novelty’ of NFE by invoking its important role in Yugoslav political socialisation. This is a common feature of interventions that ‘take an idea or concept out of one historical or institutional context and repurpose it to serve the goals of intervention’.Footnote 102 But NFE as a part of socialist political life is different from the accounts of 1990s that focused on working against, rather than with, the regime. And importantly, they both differ from the way that NFE is experienced today.

A young woman in charge of two year-long courses captured the comparison well:

Some time ago … Let’s say in the last decade, when you would come to [the organisation] you were a little revolutionary [mali revolucionar] and desired change. Now you are an individual fighting for yourself.Footnote 103

This points to depoliticisation as an effect of intervention – no one is bringing down dictators today. But outside of intervention’s field of visibility, it points to the experience of ‘fighting for yourself’. The two were often in stark contrast. The seven-week seminar on transitional justice, for example, was designed around cases from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and we discussed details of war crimes and atrocities. Some of the emotional burden of these discussions was removed by the legalist frameworks used, and I suspect, by the participants’ experience in discussing this topic that shaped much of civil society in Serbia.Footnote 104 War crimes cases were political and politicised. However, I often found them difficult: I was not used to the field and the legalist framework did not remove the shock of graphic detail. After a particularly gruelling session detailing a massacre, I joined a couple of participants over coffee.Footnote 105 As soon as we exited the door, they started updating each other on the status of ongoing job applications directed at civil society organisations that we met in one seminar or another. A common friend was recently fired for misspelling a speaker’s name and failing to provide water during a public event. Another one got a job that many people, including my colleagues, had applied for. And a new call had opened, but it required more experience than my colleagues had – they were debating whether the effort of applying was worth it. The juxtaposition of the political nature of war crimes persecution and the seemingly apolitical job application points to more than the affective dissonance I personally experienced. It brings into view coeval lives outside of NFE classrooms, where the reasons for coming to the classrooms in the first place were formed: a need for skills and networks.

This value of NFE on the labour market was captured well in an interview with an Erasmus+ (previously Youth in Action) trainer when he reflected on the development of the flagship EU NFE programme:

Youth in Action became an employment service. Unfortunately, employment service meaning that we, like, train youth to be super employable. And Youth in Action began as building solidarity, intercultural understanding … yeah, yeah, yeah … All those values [sve ono vrednosno], and it ended up as ‘let’s build super employable young people since they are complaining that they cannot find jobs.’Footnote 106

Like NFE veterans that reminisced about the overtly political nature of NFE (and civil society more generally) in the fight against Milošević, the EU-funded programmes noticeably changed from social values of ‘solidarity’ and ‘intercultural understanding’, to being an ‘employment service’.

Once the field expands to consider experiences of (un)employment, different logics of improving employability of young people come into view. And it is within these different logics that politics of improvement lie. The young people I spoke prepared for entrepreneurship and civil society, with politics increasingly unavailable to anyone not following the ruling party line. Many were exploring options for postgraduate education – my own experiences of applications, internships, and scholarships started numerous conversations. But there are also other, substantially different, projects targeting distinctive groups. I want to briefly mention two: migration and vocational or ‘dual’ education. Even though the young people attending NFE activities were not directly involved in these programmes, and I therefore did not observe them first-hand, inquiring into the wider politics of improving youth (un)employment brought to fore these experiences that otherwise remain obscured.

Training for migration as one ‘alternative way’ of improving employability was brought to my attention by Jelena, a professional seminar-goer I got to know. Jelena was explicitly ‘political:’ she grew up protesting against Milošević with her parents and saw her future in one of the human rights NGOs in Belgrade. When I met her, she was finishing her second MA and looking for a job. The gloomy prospect made her look outside of the desired NGO circle. She was considering starting her own publishing house through a state project for helping young entrepreneurs, and simultaneously trying to find a teaching position in one of many schools in Belgrade. Telling me about it, she emphasised that I cannot imagine how many schools there are in Belgrade. She only finds out about them when she sees the job listing: ‘You enter a building, and op, there’s a school!’Footnote 107 She mentioned a particular school located on the fourth floor of a building in downtown Belgrade: on one side there are four classrooms of a medical nursing school (years one to four) and on the other side four classrooms for learning German. The match is obvious: as soon as they obtain their qualification, the students are ready to work in Germany.

In this school, Jelena observed a small illustration of a much larger phenomenon of economic migration from Serbia (and the Yugoslav region more generally), and the training for migration that is a part of it.Footnote 108 It is particularly strong in the health and care sectors and forms a part of the now famous ‘demographic crisis’ in South East Europe.Footnote 109 This migration is often helped by development agencies and bilateral agreements. The GIZFootnote 110 programme for the recruitment of nurses from Serbia to Germany, for example, sees it as a triple win: a decrease in unemployment in countries of origin; development of origin countries through remittances; and a solution to a shortage of nurses in Germany.Footnote 111 These movements depend not only on a particular image of the ‘free’ subject that can pursue employment without worrying about social ties left behind, but it is also driven by symbolic geographies that see (employment in) the West as a way out of the futurelessness and corruption of Serbia.Footnote 112 It is a process wherein ‘the horizon of hope is transposed onto imagined lives abroad’.Footnote 113

Another alternative emerged in the public debate around ‘dual’ or ‘vocational’ education that unfolded during my stay in Serbia. I encountered it in the media as directly related to unemployment, but also through an organisation that both managed a NFE programme, and publicly protested the proposed educational reforms.Footnote 114 The conversation around the reform was led by the Serbian Chamber of Commerce and supported by several development agencies that provided technical support and funding.Footnote 115 Vocational education is supposed to benefit students by providing an opportunity to earn money (by spending a part of their school week at work) and gain skills that not only make them generally more employable, but also provide a chance for continued employment in the same company.Footnote 116 In the public discourse, dual education became a symbol of far-reaching societal transformations. The then-Prime Minister (now President) Aleksandar Vučić explained that the model was crucial for a whole range of ‘most important questions that we [Serbians] have to best answer about … employment, GDP growth, life standard, European integration’.Footnote 117 His comment situates dual education within the wider project of development through foreign direct investment (FDI) that has emerged as the hegemonic political imaginary of progress in the last decade.Footnote 118 In short, while advocates of dual education presented it as a key element in negotiations that facilitate the arrival of FDI in Serbia, opponents condemned it as another way of favouring big capital at the expense of citizens.Footnote 119

FDI – the implicit backdrop of vocational education – was contested in NFE classrooms. One of the most eagerly awaited speakers in a course for youth in right-of-centre political parties was a guest from Germany. It was a special occasion, attended by the representative of the foundation that funds the course, and the project manager was visibly nervous: used to dealing with the young participants, she was now performing for the people funding her employment. The speaker was there as an experienced politician, and he spoke about the German model of social market economy. But a very different topic emerged as soon as the Q&A opened. The students prepared: they knew he had left politics and has since become a successful businessperson and the designer of one of the most famous (and controversial) FDI projects in Serbia.

They opened with questions about investments in Serbia: how did he decide to come? Why? What place does Serbia have in long-term business plans? The politician-turned-investor explained the choice to come to Serbia by comparing it to two other options: Southeast Asia (deemed less attractive due to transport costs and ‘less trained workforce’) and Bulgaria (deemed politically less stable and therefore less able to provide state support for procuring licenses). Serbia was the winner of the race to the bottom: labour was affordable but qualified, the state was strong enough to subsidise financially and ‘move’ legislation and licenses, and it was close enough to the European market. Hearing it put this simply, I braced for the expected storm: while the aspiring technocrats in the audience might accept this economism, the nationalists – there was a wide variety of right-wing party members present – will surely intervene!

I was very wrong. Many hands went up, not to challenge this narrative, but to appropriate it: is there a chance for an investment in a different region? What exactly would they need to consider opening more factories elsewhere? Does he know that there are free trade zones opening around the country?Footnote 120 Instead of condemning exploitation, my classmates saw it as an opportunity for development. Political NFE thus became a stage where general issues of improvement were both debated and tried, and where FDI was seen as an opportunity to create jobs. Politics of improvement as a lens here connects NFE as a site of labour and ideas, dual education seemingly separated from it, and FDI as an increasingly hegemonic understanding of both economic and social development in Serbia.

This expanded field of visibility points to the movement of labour, capital, and ideas of human value that shape the youth labour market and the experiences of my interlocutors. It improves our understanding of how particular everyday political economies are formed under international presence and ways in which postconflict transformations in the Yugoslav region result in increasing precariousness.Footnote 121 However, it also expands the view from the actions of interveners – who invest in NFE activities – to manifold international flows of capital and labour that come together to shape what young people dream of and where they find employment. And, contrary to research that analyses and critiques NFE as a process of governmentalisation to shape the population to a particular ideal, this expanded field of visibility uncovers a quiet coexistence of radically different ways of preparing young people for the labour market: one that nurtures an entrepreneurial spirit and self-employment, and another one that creates a narrow-skilled workforce ready to be harnessed by the private sector (in the country or abroad).

Translating hierarchies between the local and the international

In expanded fields of visibility where politics of improvement unfold, civilisational hierarchies work beyond and besides the local-international binary. Agents of intervention are usually understood to be donors and organisations that directly and indirectly promote ‘international’ ideas supposed to shape local populations and politics. In NFE, these are governmental and non-governmental organisations supporting democracy and development through building capacities and civil societies. In this process, local actors and circumstances are often pathologised through Balkanist discourses. Investigating NFE as politics of improvement, however, expands our view: from the labour and power of representing ‘the local’ as the target and tool of improvement, to other, sometimes more important, hierarchies.

First, horizontal civilisational hierarchies are used to position Serbia as simultaneously inferior to Europe and superior to countries positioned geographically further East/South.Footnote 122 Explanations of problems, offered by both trainers and participants, often fixated on local pathologies: failed state policies that produced failing citizens. Take, for an example, a seminar on the EU integration process that was a part of a long-standing ‘advanced undergraduate course’ (funded by various corporate and political foundations throughout its existence) that I occasionally attended. The guest speaker held a high position in the EU accession negotiating team and he started the lecture by talking about the long process of EU integration in Serbia, then counting 17 years already. He quickly added that one never really starts from zero: Serbia started from ‘minus five years’ after the regime change in 2000. During the lecture, this number grew to Serbia being 10 and then 15 years behind the rest of the region in its ‘return to Europe’.Footnote 123

This temporal othering was not happening in an anthropological text by an enthusiastic ethnologist discovering the Balkans. It was performed by a progressive, educated, cosmopolitan member or the Serbian elite, for a class of aspiring students in their early twenties. In many classrooms I visited, Balkanist allochronism was not just a ‘foreign’ imposition but it was constantly re-enacted: if we spoke about unemployment, we talked about the outdated education system and the unreasonable expectations from the labour market that young people inherited from socialism (although they were mostly born after its end). Both the state structures and the people in the country were seen as backward when compared to European ideals.

At the same time as denigrating the country and the people in it, the same horizontal axis was used to differentiate Serbia from those ‘more backward’. This happened, for example, when comparing Serbia to African countries and using their similarities to demonstrate Serbian backwardness. In a seminar explaining the dire state of Serbian economy, the lecturer was trying to show the students the connections between economic progress and the rule of law. To illustrate the gravity of the situation in Serbia, he reached for a comparison: ‘you can’t expect economic progress when you have the rule of law on the level of Senegal.’ Students laughed in response – the comparison is unthinkable. But the trainer silenced the giggles ‘these are international comparisons!’Footnote 124

Similar comparisons have been noted in passing by other researchers. Theodora Vetta, for example, interviewed an NGO worker who described the hardship of the early 1990s:

I remember an example from eastern Serbia, there were people paid to help other people to be pushed into the bus!!! You know, like in India, like in Bangladesh. Really from being in the first world we fell [to] the third in a matter of years.Footnote 125

These comparisons are effective because a racial and civilisational logic makes the parallel unacceptable: Serbia should not be like the Global South. The same logic underlines the absence of other spaces that went through conflict and economic ‘transitions’ from our discussions. While some experienced civil society employees would criticise decontextualised foreign expertise by describing them as arriving ‘thinking that this is Mozambique’, there was no space to discuss potential similarities or solidarities to, for example, Mozambique as a space with a history of recent conflict. Recognising possible shared material realities was precluded by claims to Europeanness and its constitutive exclusions.

Finally, the same civilisational hierarchies were used to explain inequalities within Serbia. This vertical axis ‘uses notions related to Europeanness to (re)produce hierarchies and exercise exclusions/expulsions of various segments of the [same] population’.Footnote 126 It operates within countries and uses individualistic ideas about hard work and entrepreneurship – inspired by global images of backwardness and productivity – to justify why some people are targeted by governmental power to become more competitive and more ambitious, while others are conspicuously silenced. Both NFE trainers and participants relied on a common-sensical division within Serbia that contains within it allochronism: the idea that inequality is explained by a civilisational lag in a part of a population, rather than, for instance, contradictions within capitalism.

When a trainer would describe Serbian society as ‘schizophrenic’ for being seemingly unable to decide whether to ‘accept or reject EU values’, they and the class they were speaking to would be implicitly excluded from this general societal condition.Footnote 127 In discussions we had about faulty education systems and the failed labour subjects they create, young people in the room did not consider themselves equally damaged as their less successful peers. My interlocutors also provided a particular explanation of inequality that used their own commitment as proof that precarity can be ameliorated by improving oneself. This is best illustrated in an interview with a young woman employed in a large NFE organisation, who had herself completed several NFE programmes. I asked her about the motivation of so many young people I met at the organisation:

The most important challenge in growing up is that you have to equip yourself [osposobiti se] for the labour market, which is quite closed … And then your … I mean, it is simply not enough that you just get a university degree and that you are academically … on any level, even on the highest level … It’s not enough.

We are all afraid of jobs in some … If everything will be ok, if we will have a salary, if everything will be ok tomorrow … Will it be this way or that way …? All these are … The labour market conditions you [uslovi te]. But the good side of this is that really everyone is then all over the place.

It’s only an excuse to say, ‘I am studying at a university’ I’m telling you: I studied and finished in time [u roku].Footnote 128 By then I already had two jobs when I was finishing, and I think this can be accomplished … It’s just … Just good organisation, good plan, and serious motivation. And the motivation firstly comes from the outside, I think in our growing up, and then it somehow quickly moves to the inside. When you are already finishing your degree and you really start to really want this … And somehow these two connect.Footnote 129

She offers a particular explanation of inequality: her own commitment is proof that precarity can be ameliorated by improving oneself. Individualist meritocracy celebrates having a ‘good organisation’ and ‘serious motivation’, while at the same time providing a critique of the ‘excuses’ that others might make. This points to a more general understanding of the difference between NFE-goers as modern citizens, and their peers who were not a part of the choir to which the NGO sector was preaching: these young minds were opened through a combination of will, self-sacrifice, and skill. Here, the accusation of ‘passivity’ and ‘apathy’ did not refer only to political action (as discussed in the literature), but also to actively taking personal responsibility for employment.

Beyond the local/international binary, seeing NFE within a wider politics of improvement brings to the fore the motley life that hierarchies of local/international, Western/non-Western, and modern/backward have beyond the discourses of interveners. This reconceptualisation helps empirically and theoretically link global and local hierarchies, showing their co-constitution and ways in which global politics connect with everyday experience. This does not mean ignoring the very real power imbalances that structure intervention encounters but aims at understanding them better. Approaching these hierarchies as constitutive of politics of improvement creates the space for considering their enactment horizontally (to spaces not limited to those with direct experiences of colonisation and slavery) and vertically (within societies) as they make international politics on multiple scales.