Suchergebnisse

Following the trial of the six intellectuals, one of Yugoslavia's best-known writers announced the formation of a committee to defend free thought On 10 November 1984, five days after the trial of the 'Belgrade Six' began, the well-known Yugoslav novelist Dobrica Ćosić announced the setting up of the Committee for the Freedom of Thought and Expression. The Ćosić Committee manifesto was signed by 19 most eminent Serbian men of letters, art and science, including 12 members of the prestigious Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. What is most striking about the signatories is that they cover the whole spectrum of opinion of the Belgrade intelligentsia, from pre-war party veterans (Gojko Nikoliš, Tanasije Mladenović), Marxist philosophers of the Praxis group (Mihailo Marković, Ljubomir Tadić), advocates of pluralistic socialist democracy (Kosta Čavoški), and the so-called 'nationalists' (Matija Bećković, Mića Popović) to public figures who simply want an affirmation of the rule of law in a country which has had more than its fair share of lawlessness, both under the present and previous regimes, not to mention the terrible wartime period when Yugoslavs, possessed by the demon of self-destruction, engaged in a bloody and tragic civil war. Dobrica Ćosić sent the manifesto with a covering letter to the official news agency Tanjug, the radio and television services of the eight Yugoslav republics and provinces, and 30 dailies, weeklies and periodicals. The media responded with a vitriolic campaign against Ćosić and his committee. A Belgrade Radio commentary said the manifesto was 'inspired by a desire to portray the social system in Yugoslavia as a reign of ideological terror, bureaucratic arbitrariness, police persecution — in a word, Stalinism'. Belgrade's Politika Ekspres implied that Ćosić had joined Tito's partisans (he was the political commissar of a partisan unit in Serbia) only because he wanted to be on the winning side. Zagreb's Vjesnik liked this so much that it decided to reprint it, adding its own subheadings (one of them read: 'A Dirty Business'), but Belgrade's Književne Novine deplored this attempt to cast a slur on Ćosić's wartime record. While Književne Novine was the only paper to spring to Ćosić's defence, the hardline Croatian youth weekly Polet was the only one to carry the committee's manifesto and Ćosić's covering letter, though only to attack both Ćosić and Western critics of the current wave of repression in Yugoslavia. Vjesnik took Ćosić to task for visiting Zagreb in order to canvass support for his initiative, publishing its attack under the heading Gedža u Zagrebu (' The [Serbian] Yokel in Zagreb'). Zagreb's Večernji List said: 'The political prompters and ideological fathers of the Belgrade petitioners have now at long last appeared on the stage and presented themselves to the public…. They obviously feel morally obliged to come to the aid of their puppets now standing trial for hostile activity.' NIN wondered whether Yugoslav opposition elements were appealing for an intervention from abroad. We are grateful to the London-based South Slav Journal for the English translation.

This article develops the argument that a 'knowledge economy,' despite its cheerful optimism, is also an elegant incarnation of the demise of Western economies. An analysis of policy documents, research statements, and national accounts reveals this paradoxical coexistence of anxiety and progress in the discourse on knowledge economies. While the concept is often hailed as a temporal concept (superseding other forms of economic production), this article argues that a knowledge economy is best understood as a spatial concept – it is a way of contending with global reorganizations of production. This spatial approach is elaborated to tackle three paradoxes. (1) A knowledge economy enfolds defeat with progress. (2) A knowledge economy downplays the importance of industrial labor and simultaneously depends on it to materialize its ideas. (3) While seemingly intangible and ephemeral, a knowledge economy is fixed in place in national economies through government and corporate policy (including through the emergent phenomenon of 'knowledge-adjusted gross domestic products'). A spatial approach provides a view of the tenuous global interconnections and specific conditions that prop up a knowledge economy, and shows how the concept is mobilized to redraw the map so that endangered economies can regain their challenged sense of centrality in a world economy.