Asymptomatic Nationalism and Its Woke Symptoms: Nationalists without Nationalism in Postsocialist Montenegro

The main ethnopolitical antagonism in Montenegro – between Montenegrins and Serbs – differs from the rest of the post-Yugoslav region due to the lack of ethnic distance between the two communities. While intermarriage is considered perfectly normal, ethnicity becomes problematic only when politicized – when it becomes a basis for political power struggles. Until the statehood status became the central political issue in the 2000s, Montenegrin and Serb identities were neither mutually exclusive nor inherently antagonistic; with substantial overlap, they were often interchangeable. However, political polarization around the issue of state independence eventually split families apart, even dividing siblings ethnonationally – those favoring independence identified as Montenegrins, while those opposed identified as Serbs – creating two antagonistic ethnopolitical camps in the process. Since Montenegro’s independence in 2006, only Serb nationalists openly embrace the nationalist label, whereas Montenegrin nationalists reject it, instead adopting a position of “civic patriotism” and denying the existence of Montenegrin nationalism altogether. By analyzing population census data over the past three decades of postsocialist transformation in Montenegro, alongside op-ed pieces by self-proclaimed “Montenegrin patriots”, this paper draws on Hall’s theory of articulation and Boltanski and Thévenot’s theory of justification to account for what I label “asymptomatic nationalism”. First, the paper focuses on the macro-level of ethnonational division in Montenegro, employing process tracing to understand why and how ethnic and other differences were linked into two (ethno)political “chains of equivalence” during the state-building process under the same (semi)authoritarian regime, resulting in two opposing ethnonational identities. Second, it shifts to the micro-level through critical discourse analysis, examining how Montenegrin nationalists use “civic wokeness” to mask nationalist exclusion, justifying the marginalization of Montenegrin Serbs in the name of protecting the country’s “civilizational values” and its “European future” from the supposed “Balkan backwardness” they attribute to Montenegrin Serbs and their politics.