“We Are Not a Third-World Country”: Geopolitical Anxieties of Belonging Amongst Serbian Potential Migrants

Emerging from long-term ethnographic research on the phenomenon of brain drain from Serbia, this paper will analyze a heated focus group debate about the material conditions of life in Serbia. I examine how participants marshaled the Cold War-era three-worlds paradigm to construct a global hierarchy of value and negotiate the place of Serbia within it. Embedded in a larger discussion about staying and leaving Serbia, I read this geopolitical jockeying as mobility talk: a register through which participants weighed the relative merits of life “here” versus life imagined “over there.” In such talk, geopolitical anxieties are expressed through a discourse of values in which the West is constructed as a place where meritocracy and order reigns in contrast to the “negative selection” and devaluing of expertise said to characterize life in Serbia. Individual hierarchies of value are mapped onto geopolitical hierarchies and mobility features as a strategy to become “differently valued, differently desirable, and differently competitive” (Patico 2010:40). I argue that such collective sketching of the bounds of a normal life--and controversy over where such a life can be lived--is one way that middle-classness is constituted in the postsocialist context. As debate over the bounds of Europeanness reach a fever pitch, such research from the “periphery” of the continent can offer insight into the value and meaning of belonging for potential migrants.