Abstract
Croatia has experienced a marked boom in household debt in the 2000s. Much of this lending took high-risk and predatory forms that transferred significant risks to debtors, which in turn became the target of contestation by debt activists. This paper uses the Polanyian idea of “double movement” to show how the Croatian debt contestations responded to the distinctively peripheral form of financialization in Eastern Europe, characterized by unequal geoeconomic relationships and an intensified expropriation of debtors. This framework further highlights the importance of money in contemporary credit/debt relationships and their contestation, which has so far received insufficient attention in relevant anthropological scholarship. Instead of the currently fashionable credit theories of money, the paper uses the Marxian concept of the fetishism of money to unpack the roles of money in these processes. The analysis of discourses and practices of two groups of debtors and activists reveals how they used nationalist ideological frameworks and institutional channels such as litigation, again largely ignored by existing anthropological literature, to challenge the particular inequalities of peripheral financialization and the expropriation of debtors through the lenders’ predatory manipulations of the money fetish.
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Notes
The Croatian title was Problemi ovršenih i opljačkanih. The adjective ovršeni comes from ovrha, legal term for debt enforcement proceedings. It may encompass monetary assets as well as movable and immovable property; separate proceedings commonly take place for different types of property.
Research participants were anonymized wherever possible.
During five months of fieldwork, I conducted participant observation in activist meetings, banking events, court hearings, protests, evictions, and other relevant situations. I undertook more than 90 in-depth interviews with debtors, bankers, activists, regulators, lawyers, experts, and various household lending and debt collection professionals.
While carry trade is usually associated with cross-currency trading, it may also target interest rate differentials between jurisdictions sharing the same currency, such as for example the core and the periphery of the eurozone.
In addition to many informal conversations, I conducted formal interviews with eight coop debtors (including one married couple and a father and son), two of whom, Ante and Ljubica, were activists heading two separate debtor groups. I also interviewed Sandra, the lawyer, and Martina, the speaker from the introductory vignette, who was a former debtor of Slovenian creditors with a similar modus operandi and supported Ante’s group.
However, the law was effectively suspended by a decision of the European Court of Justice in February 2019.
Ethnic Serbs were overrepresented in some state agencies in socialist Yugoslavia, especially the police and the army. However, it is widely believed that most Serbs were purged from Croatian state institutions during and after the 1991–1995 Croatian war, in which ethnic minority Serbs rebelled against the newly independent Croatia.
I conducted formal interviews with: 14 franc debtors (including three couples); nine current or former franc debt activists, most of whom were also franc debtors; and a lawyer with a close knowledge of collective and individual litigation related to franc loans (Sandra).
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Acknowledgments
I undertook the research for and writing of early versions of this paper as a Research Fellow and a member of the “Financialisation” Research Group at the Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology. I made later revisions of the piece as a Research Fellow in the project “Western Banks in Eastern Europe: New Geographies of Financialisation” (GEOFIN), which has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program (grant agreement no. 683197). The early versions were presented in October 2017 in a weekly seminar of the Department “Resilience and Transformation in Eurasia” of the Max Planck Institute and at the EASA Anthropology of Economy Network workshop on “Deservingness—power, morality and inequality in contemporary Europe and beyond” in Vienna. I thank all who read the drafts and offered comments on those and other occasions, including Tristam Barrett, Charlotte Bruckermann, Christoph Brumann, Natalia Buier, Kirsten Endres, Chris Hann, Don Kalb, Dimitra Kofti, Patrícia Matos, Petra Rodik, Andreas Streinzer, Jelena Tošić, Theodora Vetta, and Hadas Weiss. I also thank all my research participants in Croatia, who indebted me by sharing so much about debts of their own and others.
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Mikuš, M. Contesting household debt in Croatia: the double movement of financialization and the fetishism of money in Eastern European peripheries. Dialect Anthropol 43, 295–315 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-019-09551-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-019-09551-8