Symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall, the peaceful revolutions of 1989 promised access to democracy, new freedoms, human rights, and prosperity to half of the European continent. The discredited Communist experiment was seen as a double victory for liberal democracies and capitalism. Thirty five years on, several Central European nations have slipped into forms of illiberal democracy. Further west, far-right parties are in power in Italy, and on the cusp of power in many others. Even in countries in which the far right is not (yet) a central force, immigration laws, criminal justice, and many basic freedoms have been curtailed. Policing has become more forceful and sometimes arbitrary, new external borders have been erected, and there is a general trend to more restrictive public policies. This worrying political evolution has wide-ranging and differentiated historical, social, and economic causes which cannot be fully addressed in a brief talk. I will limit myself to unpacking some of the tensions between economic liberalism and liberal democracy, terms which in 1990 seemed to constitute the two essential interlocking ingredients of the superiority of the western system. The central argument is twofold. First, it was not unfettered capitalism which had proved its superior ability to promote broad prosperity, but the post-war compromise between capital and labor and the social State which secured economic security and prosperity, and limited income inequalities and political stability. The liberalization of European economies had started with the Reagan/Thatcher “revolutions,” but accelerated in the west following 1989, and was administered as a “shock therapy” to the fledgling democracies in East and Central Europe. In Western Europe, the State is no longer seen as a reliable purveyor of social protections in case of hardship, and the provision of public services and the quality of education and health services have declined, thereby eroding the mechanisms of consent and providing fodder for political movements nostalgic for the protections of an ethnically homogenous Nation-State. Second, economic liberalism thrives on the circulation of workers and the mobility of capital to invest and create jobs where profits can be maximized. The Single European Act and the free movement of workers of the new member States of the EU in the 2000s increased economic freedoms, access to goods, and better pay and working conditions for some, but also multiplied the disciplinary forces of capitalism, increasing inequalities and existential insecurities. It became easier for investors seeking higher returns to relocate jobs or impose wage restraints. Conversely, many vital low-wage and insecure jobs in Western Europe were taken on by migrants from Central Europe in elderly and health care, services, or construction. Profits and many economic sectors in the West largely rely on cheap European and extra-European migrant labor. This has led to growing fears in the East of the hollowing out of the population and in the West to a feeling of dispossession and unfair competition, which has been exploited by far right parties. This constitutive tension has been tackled in the past two decades by erecting physical and bureaucratic borders of varying permeability, resulting in the increasingly restrictive and inhumane treatment of asylum seekers and low-skilled economic migrants, while at the same time encouraging the migration of high-skilled labor and the EU internal work mobilities. This selectively permeable border regulation seeking to ease the tensions between economic and political liberalism remains largely unresolved.

Once the Berlin wall felt, peoples in Central-Eastern Europe began their transition from Soviet communism to liberal democracy. The main slogan of this transition claimed that the new societal condition would be that of “democracy and market economy.” This has been seen as the realm of freedom and human rights. But few in these countries realized that market economy was not synonymous with the global corporate capitalism of late 1980s and that liberal democracy was not always compatible with the logic of the market. Today, forty years after the fall of the Berlin wall, the experience of the post-communist transition gives new arguments for the discussion about the conditions of compatibility between democracy and capitalism.

This is an attempt to discuss the interplay between social stratification and transnational space through the lens of the theory of social bordering. The transnational space is regarded not only through its geographical attributes but also as a meaning device that bears the signs of economic, social, and cultural differences of the actors. Spaces of origin or spaces of destination have a symbolic value and become cultural markers. Thus, changing physical spaces means also changing social perceptions about “migrants,” “refugees,” and “ex-pats” (these labels are not innocent), and drives specific ways of social repositioning on behalf of the actors facing transnational movements.

As the Wall tumbled down, and Berlin was about to cease being an enclave in 1989, the stage was being set for another round of enclavization in a different corner of Europe. This time, it was the result of a new wave of reversals of positions between the Albanian majority and Serbian minority in Kosovo and Metohija. The paper analyzes the strategy of enclavization of Serbian communities as an instrument of the dismemberment of population concentrations, creating the necessary preconditions for ethnic cleansing. Paradoxically, the Serbian communities were not reluctant to self-enclavize at the same time, in a desperate attempt to fend off Albanian provocations and violence. Thus was created a vicious circle of enclavization. Various elements of this paradoxical process have been presented in documentary materials and films, as well as in a number of feature films. In the paper, two Serbian feature films, four documentaries, and a number of video documents will be analyzed, focusing in particular on the visual representations of spatial enclosures, as well as on the filmic means of communicating the internal experience of being ghettoized.