Guilt, Responsibility, and Denial. Eric Gordy

to draw conclusions about moral responsibility as “my own conscience and communication with friends and people close to me who out of love are concerned for my soul.”⁶⁷ Individualization of moral guilt, for Jaspers, does not diminish the obligation all people have to interrogate their own false declarations of loyalty, beliefs in the legitimacy of the regime that committed offenses, and personal compromises.

      3. Metaphysical guilt. Jaspers begins his discussion of this category by postulating, “Solidarity exists between people as members of the human race, which makes everybody co-responsible for all injustice and unfairness in the world, and especially for crimes committed with their knowledge or in their presence.” This form of responsibility, while diffuse and not easily expressed in terms of law, politics, or morality, is fundamental, since “if people did not have any kind of metaphysical guilt, they would be angels, and the other concepts of guilt would have no content.” The feeling of metaphysical guilt produced by knowledge of crime “destroys the absolute solidarity of people with one another.”⁶⁸ It can be understood as a universal feeling that interferes with a person’s conception of self as fully human.

      To avoid confusion, it may be appropriate to consider the latter three forms proposed by Jaspers not as variations of guilt but as varieties of responsibility. Jaspers uses a different terminology, but implies the distinction in specifying instances for each form: for criminal liability a court, for political guilt force and the will of the victor, for moral guilt the individual conscience, and for metaphysical guilt God.⁶⁹ Herein the term “guilt” refers to a specific status defined by a judicial institution. The term “responsibility” refers to states of feeling or judgment operating on the level of relationships, perceptions, and individual self-assessment.

      Concepts of collective guilt make little sense from any point of view. As Lewis points out, “If guilt, in the proper sense, turns on deliberate wrong-doing, it seems that no one can be guilty for the act of another person—there can be no shared or collective or universal guilt.”⁷⁰ At its worst, collective guilt recapitulates the nationalist collectivism that produced an environment conducive to crime. But the question of collective responsibility may not be so clear cut. Following Jaspers, at least one form of collective responsibility, “metaphysical guilt,” is common to every person. We do not have to share his mysticism to understand feelings of responsibility as functioning partly on the level of the individual, and partly in the context of identities and relationships. In this sense responsibility has to do with our sense of who we are, our sense of one another, and people’s sense of us. Collective perceptions and feelings are involved at all these levels.

      Some wordplay might help to illustrate how responsibility is distinct from guilt. The first part of the word is “response.” In his essay on “responsibility” in the Hastings Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, David Fyffe invents the synonym “answerableness.”⁷¹ The rhetorical figure works in Serbo-Croatian as well: the root of odgovornost (responsibility) is odgovor (answer). Here responsibility is taken to mean the ability to respond—in the sense that there is a need for answers and an effort to produce answers.

      This study approaches various aspects of the effort to establish guilt and address responsibility. It moves from an examination of initial states of public opinion in Serbia to an exploration of some of the first “moments” when it appeared that a wide-ranging dialogue might begin. The discussion is structured to move from detailed examination of “moments” to theoretical and contextual analysis that tries to answer the question of why some incidents turned out the way they did. Then several “nonmoments” are examined, in which positions and understandings remained in place despite events. The picture that emerges is one of a social process begun but not completed, with divisions and contested understandings remaining. The conclusion suggests some explanations for this mixed state of events and proposes some possible means of moving forward.

       Chapter 2

      The Formation of Public Opinion: Serbia in 2001

      There are obvious difficulties in describing the state of readiness in Serbian society to engage with questions of the recent past and responsibility for it just after the change of regime on 5 October 2000. Processes were not only ongoing, but might also be perceived as having been just at their beginning, at least as far as large-scale public opinion is concerned. But any kind of explanation of the development of public opinion needs a starting point. This study takes as its starting point the moment at which it was possible to engage in discussion free of overwhelming constraint.

      It is of course not the case that all discussion began in 2001. Public opinion had been in some ways prepared before the change of regime. On the one hand, it had been prepared to resist the topic. Part of this consequence derives from the cumulative effects of propaganda campaigns and campaigns for the control of information directed by the previous regime—if they can be said to have had any effect, then that effect probably remained in place in the period immediately following the end of that regime. These effects were likely enhanced by several factors. First, there was an extended period during which substantive positions people held about concrete issues of responsibility were mixed with generalized if momentary feelings of resentment or revenge, contributing to a lack of clarity regarding what was at stake. Second, the entire issue of responsibility in Serbia remained and remains clouded by the fact that even if forces controlled and financed by the Serbian government committed the largest share of crimes, they were not the only forces to commit crimes. Third, while most people in Serbia had at best secondhand experience of the wars in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo, nearly everybody had direct experience of the NATO bombing campaign in 1999. The perception was and still remains quite popular in Serbia that any admission of responsibility in the wars of succession could amount to a justification of the NATO campaign, which was almost universally opposed in the country for reasons that would not surprise anybody.

      It might be reasonable to expect that the effects of regime-era public opinion would diminish as the regime receded into the past. In this chapter it is argued that a set of conditions needed to be present for such a shift in public opinion to occur. For a variety of reasons, not all of these conditions had been achieved a decade later.

      The discourse of responsibility did not emerge suddenly in Serbia. At least on a small scale, public discussions of the question began at the same time the war began. Most of these initiatives came either as private initiatives or as efforts on the part of independent (and generally small) groups of intellectuals. Among these have to be counted the ongoing “Druga Srbija” campaign of the Belgrade Circle of Independent Intellectuals (Beogradski krug nezavisnih intelektualaca), the ongoing documentation efforts of the Belgrade Center for Human Rights (Beogradski centar za ljudska prava) and the Fund for Humanitarian Law (Fond za humanitarno pravo), and perhaps most visibly, the conference “Istina, odgovornost, pomirenje” (Truth, Responsibility, Reconciliation) held in Ulcinj in the spring of 2000. Some other contributions were made in publications such as Republika, which was broadly associated with civic and antiwar movements, and Helsinška povelja, associated with the Yugoslav Helsinki Committee. The independent radio station B92 also maintained efforts to inform the debate, translating and publishing books of analysis and documentation about the wars,¹ featuring discussions of the issue in its broadcast programs,² and dedicating special issues of the journal Reč associated with the station to the theme. However, the debate could not reach a wide audience, partly because most major media were controlled by a regime that had a concrete interest in suppressing the question, and partly because the fresh experience of war (combined with mostly one-sided information about the war) did not prepare many members of the public for an open discussion.

      Inevitably, early takes on the state of public opinion are likely to be distorted. It will quickly become apparent in this chapter that the most commonly used means for exploring public opinion, opinion surveys, are of only limited use in this case. It will be necessary as the narrative develops to put together some richer, if less numerical, sources in order to indicate more fully the dilemmas in public opinion at the time and to suggest some of the directions that might have been available.

       Contradictory Survey Findings