By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
Yesterday, Danijel Zivkovic, the leader of the DPS, said in parliament – paraphrasing – that for his party, tradition and customs are more important than the rule of law.
That’s a smart statement. In lumpen-conservative societies like Montenegro, where people talk about “tradition,” but practice cocaine, adultery, and prostitution, you can’t go wrong invoking “traditional values.”
It’s like recommending alcohol to a group of wine cellar regulars; like applauding Pavle and Metodije at a fascist memorabilia fair; or like taking a sip, drawing on a cigarette, and rasping “Toma is the best” during a heated but well-argued tavern debate over whether Halid or Saban reigns supreme (no-brainer—it’s Halid, by the way). You’re preaching to the choir, is what I’m saying.
The offered dichotomy, however, is false: both tradition and the rule of law are tools for controlling the population and preserving class, national, or religious hegemony. Both, as Foucault would say, are instruments of policing. Let’s recall: for Foucault, policing isn’t just what the police do—it’s the essence of what we call politics. Policing isn’t a way to fight crime, but a practice of surveillance and control over the entire society, including everything that seems non-political. It’s about managing all human relationships, every corner of life. Both customary law and the modern legal state (like religion) aim to regulate and order every aspect of existence.
I’ve got no horse in that race. As Vuk Micunovic said, I wouldn’t give you a Turkish coin “for all the play without the gusle” (*a tranditional Balkan instrument) (Yes, that’s irony.) If I had to choose between the “rule of law” (quotes always needed) and the chance to skip a cousin’s wedding—thereby sparing myself the audio-torture of idiotic music and the company of people who are unbearable in general, and especially when they’re supposedly cheerful—I’d take the latter. As for giving up so-called traditions and customs? I’d ask even less. A bowl of peanuts to go with a drink would be more than enough.
The “rule of law” is not a mechanism for distributing justice, but a way for those in power to control those they rule over. If we’re being honest, is there anyone in Montenegro who could, without bursting into laughter, seriously say that the courts and prosecution aren’t working under the orders of the new government, just like they once did for the DPS? The rhetoric defending the “rule of law” is identical to the rhetoric of capitalism. And both, when caught with their pants down (as they often are), fall back on the excuse that this still isn’t the real “rule of law,” just like this isn’t real capitalism—but just wait, one day when it’s real, you’ll see that it truly works. Whenever the promised utopia turns out to be a dystopia, capitalism and its repressive tools—including the “rule of law”—respond by promising yet another utopia. In the end, if we’re honest, capitalism owes its longevity as much to its brutality and cunning as to the intellectual shortcomings of its victims.
Now, a few words about tradition and customs… These are usually seen as the foundations of identity. But identity doesn’t actually exist—not as something predetermined, inherited at birth and passed on through parenthood. Identity is an imaginary construct in constant flux—it changes with everything we learn or, God forbid, read, as well as with our experiences.
The fact that identity politics are nonsense doesn’t mean they’re ineffective. In fact, things that don’t exist often have far more impact than those that clearly do. That’s why nationalism—which is a fantasy, a narrative, a collection of invented virtues and shameless goals—has far more influence on the world than a dandelion—a real plant, yet no one has started a war over one.
Identity is a construct. And the construct itself is imagined. But to be imagined, it needs solid elements. In that sense, identity construction is similar to conspiracy theories. The issue with conspiracy theories isn’t their individual components—they often contain real elements. It’s the pathological way those elements are linked. They exist, yes, but not in the relationships the conspiracy theorist claims. The same goes for identity.
Which, at its core, is a question of exploitation. As is tradition.
Braudel taught us there is no single Mediterranean—there are Mediterraneans. Likewise, there is no capital-T Tradition. There are traditions: your tradition is not necessarily mine, and mine is even less likely to be yours. But those who speak of tradition in the singular don’t mean a pluralism of traditions—they imagine a monochrome, coherent, fixed, unchangeable whole that must never be questioned, something before which one must kneel—like the black monolith around which apes dance in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Tradition, in this view, is dogma—something that cannot be debated.
And to all those who say that their grandfathers did it this way, and so will they, and so will their children…
According to the 1931 census in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, only every second person was literate, and only one in four women could read and write. https://as.edu.rs/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/AS_2010-1_07.pdf
And what do you think literacy rates were in the so-called “Njegos-era Montenegro,” the ideologically backward fantasy in whose image Andrija Mandic wants to build a 21st-century Montenegro?
So, you’ll live as your illiterate ancestors did—and raise your children to do the same? And anyone who disagrees is a traitor?
No worries: your “revival of tradition” is going well. In Tito’s Yugoslavia, only 6% of the population was illiterate. Today, in Serbia, 17% are. https://www.slobodnaevropa.org/a/balkanska-nepismenost/26581606.html
It’s a similar story, of course, in Montenegro.
The war against enlightenment is showing results. But a society that sees literacy and education as enemies is a pitiful one indeed.
(Columnists’ opinions and views do not necessarily reflect those of the CdM editorial team)
