Serbian Students and the Global Lesson in Democracy

Photograph Source: Stefan Miljuš – Public Domain

For generations of young people in Serbia and Republika Srpska (since, across the Drina, that mountain of injustice from Skender’s poem always seemed somehow more untouchable), those born after the year 2000, the direct-democratic student movement—actually the largest Serbian social movement of the past quarter of the 21st century—has already become a formative experience after which a return to the old ways is unimaginable. Some of them remember the overthrow of NATO-backed despotism in Montenegro five years ago, when that same regime declared war on basic constitutional freedoms and the right of the country’s majority to self-determination of identity. During the litije (processions), they found a unique, nonpartisan expression of Gandhian resistance in defense of democracy and against the induced sectarian hysteria. The student movement’s plenary self-organization emerged as an authentic political expression that transcends the impotence of outdated systemic options, because when there is no single leader—often with a Bonapartist image—standing before the cameras behind the movement’s demands, the regime’s machinery is unable to bribe or discredit it through orchestrated scandals. Without a target, this prevents the return of resignation rooted in the idea that everything has been tried and failed, reminiscent of the joke: “I finally have someone to vote for!”

In an attempt to tap into anti-imperialist sentiment, Vučić, upon the outbreak of blockades, compared himself to Assad. However, in reality, his regime more closely resembles the clientelist tyrannies of Egypt and Jordan, designed to discipline the Arab masses with bayonets while using the Palestinians as bargaining chips in negotiations with the corporate overlords in Washington—just as Vučić manipulates the remnants of Kosovo Serbs. A pro-Western stabilocrat isn’t overthrown via a Maidan (as Churchill would say, there is no such thing as neutrality on this or that side). Moreover, both the geopolitical map and the energy driving the base of the current uprising are fundamentally different from those of October 5th, 2000. Back then, the prevailing belief was that the West would show understanding for Serbian national interests if Belgrade fully embraced the framework of American hegemony following the fall of the Berlin Wall. That belief was far from generously rewarded, as evidenced by the unilateral recognition of Kosovo, the ultimatums of Brussels bureaucrats, and other Weimar-style humiliations.

Young Serbs in university halls, on highways, and on bridges, unlike their parents, who were sold the fairy tale that “Europe has no alternative,” understand English perfectly and, through the internet, have direct access to the unpromising trajectory the Western world has followed since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. They also have real-time access to the extermination of Gaza, which has shattered the global illusion that this same world is the guarantor of at least basic human rights—if not economic, national, and other rights. Yet, even Zakharova’s statements have proven to be as reliable concerning “color revolutions” as her American counterparts are when speaking of human rights east of Vienna. Consequently, both those who attack and those who defend the SNS regime from the standpoint of returning to the status quo of 2000-2012 are flogging a dead horse.

Because of all this, it is painfully superficial to be merely against Vučić, the chauvinistic thug from the 1990s, as the opposition ritualistically imitates Otpor, without also being against Vučić, the bureaucratic executor of IMF directives and butcher of the public sector, whom the West rehabilitated in 2012 from his Šešelj-era barbarism in order to install him as a more legitimate overseer of neoliberal chaos and monopolistic despotism, replacing the spent “yellow” political establishment. Equally ignorant and delusional is the chatter about the supposed threat to the rule of law posed by Balkan-style disorder while turning a blind eye to the fact that systematic corruption and tycoon dominance are inevitable outcomes. These problems are, among other things, a direct result of privatization laws imposed by the so-called orderly and civilized countries of the EU, laws that have ravaged Serbia’s economy and education system, reducing the country to a near-colonial status, filled with a working class driven to despair under the cover of SNS populism.

Whoever comes to power after Vučić will face the arduous task of rehabilitating a society shackled by unarticulated traumas, deliberately disoriented, and fragmented through coercion and violence. The regime’s enforcers—thugs seemingly cut from the cloth of Dragi Jovanović’s henchmen and regime terrorists behind the wheel—are merely the tip of the iceberg. This rehabilitation would resemble Montenegro’s long journey to restore national trust and dignity. However, such a task certainly isn’t fit for the liberalist (rather than consistently liberal) wing of the amateurish opposition, which spews classist hatred toward their fellow citizens at the polls, dismissing them as toothless, provincial cattle while leaving the real protagonists of the republic’s looting untouched.

Until then, in the absence of an alternative force to resist the obscurantism and entropy that have nearly devoured Serbian society, a free Serbia—at least one capable of pursuing not full independence but a relatively more independent policy—will remain an outcast.

This is precisely why the stance taken by the students of the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad during the Svetosavska ceremony at Matica Srpska is of extraordinary importance. Matica Srpska has long been regarded as a bastion of cultural policy crafted in the test tubes of the SNS, rooted in moldy bureaucratism, Zhdanov-style emptiness, clichéd uniformity, and an almost Jesuit-like—or, more precisely, Bulović-style—factionalism and servility under the guise of pretentious unity. In reality, it is a Procrustean bed, a mishmash of nationalist posturing where the most potent flavor is submission to an anti-people regime. This student protest demonstrates that Serbian youth today demands that nurturing national culture and tradition be accompanied by the development of a more modern, rational, and serious state. It shows that the cohort of Gleichschalted professors does not have exclusive ownership over the spiritual heritage of the Serbian nation. Thus, the only thing that needs to be said regarding the hypocritical response of Dragan Stanić, the institution’s lifelong president, who treated the students’ expulsion as if it were a bank or court—and not a space meant for the voices of educated youth—can be summed up in Veljko Petrović’s famous line: Old Vojvodina, have you no shame?

The starting point for healing from division and widespread alienation is to abandon Plato’s caves of ideological projections, whether from one side or the other, as well as the autistic media echo chambers. Now that political discourse has spilled into the streets, go out and talk to the students. Ask them what they’re fighting for and what they think of the opposition, social issues, and sovereignty. Ask them how they envision the so-called “day after” and the country they want to build, where they hope to grow old in peace. What you’ll hear is not the arrogance of a privileged upper-middle class. On the contrary, it’s the voice of Serbia beneath the surface—not the one found in Belgrade cafés, but the Serbia stretching from Loznica to Ivanjica, Kladovo, and Vrbas. It’s mostly from the half of the population that abstains from voting, yet whose hopes and efforts carry the interests of their country and the common people. They are fighting to clear a path out of the years of chaos devoured by locusts—a path that others like them can follow.