If we take a bird’s-eye view of Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro—where the largest share of the Serbian people lives today—we see a strikingly similar structure: three small economies neatly integrated into a semi-peripheral role—stable enough to service debt and function as markets, yet insufficiently developed for people to live off their own work without loans, relatives in the diaspora, and the routines of seasonal survival.
The common denominator is almost shameful in its simplicity: these societies are structured so that a thin stratum of political-business elites and capital owners can preserve, consolidate, and expand their positions, while the majority lives in permanent insecurity—caught between precarious contracts, overpriced housing whose purchase pushes them into clientelist dependence on those who can “make sure” the monthly loan instalment gets paid, comprador political parties, and the persistent belief that salvation lies somewhere else.
Instead of a serious public debate about who appropriates the fruits of labour and what a fairer economic order might look like, people are fed myths about “foreign investment,” the “European path,” and “stability,” while hollow speeches about “statehood” are endlessly rehearsed.
Serbia cannot be pacified
In Serbia, that exhaustion is increasingly taking the form of a student-led—and broader popular—uprising against the technocratic order of the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS): against a system that grounds its power in a mix of statistical sleight of hand, public relations, and projects designed for someone else’s capital, while persistently underestimating the intelligence and dignity of its own citizens.
The SNS regime itself, which presents as “national” and “state-building,” is in fact the clearest evidence that an authentic Serbian politics has long since disappeared from Belgrade. It operates as the local exponent of a knot of corporate, imperial, and intelligence interests tied together in the capital; as a result, the fate of the people, of Kosovo, and of the wider space inhabited by Serbs is increasingly viewed through the lens of other people’s agendas and domestic marketing needs.
Figures about growth, debt, and inflation are raised like a decorative wall around the ruling class, yet the public mood suggests something else: people still endure far more than they truly accept. That is why what began as resistance to “economic experts” is ever more often turning into resistance to the entire political framework—one that has long ceased to function as a system of governance and has been reduced to bare, endlessly repeated propaganda about an economic miracle that never quite arrives.
Republika Srpska: Between Self-Humiliation and Humiliation
In Republika Srpska—presented here as part of a UN-mandated territory, the Dayton-era Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the largest share of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Serbs live (31 percent of their total population)—the response to the same economic misery is not revolt but lethargy. The politics of the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (which has nothing in common with social democracy except its name) and its long-time leader Milorad Dodik not only exploits this lethargy; it actively manufactures it: the less people trust that change is possible, the easier it is to rule by combining periodic chauvinistic outbursts against Bosnian Muslims—“Turks”—and other designated internal enemies, with gestures of auto-colonial deference and a simulated sovereigntism, reinforced by symbolic alliances with a whole spectrum of right-wing obscurantists across the world, from Washington to Budapest. The miserable turnout—only 31 percent—in the recent RS presidential elections imposed by the colonial administration is not merely a statistic; it is a diagnosis: a people formally invited to decide have, in practice, been convinced that everything has already been decided.
Montenegro’s Double Catastrophe
In Montenegro, meanwhile, the overall social and economic crisis is refracted through a false duel between two losing affiliations: one, a chauvinistic Dukljan–Montenegrin camp, openly anti-Serb and provincially pro-Western, which has “kidnapped” and reserved for itself the antifascist legacy of the Second World War People’s Liberation Struggle; and the other, a Ravna Gora–Chetnik camp, which turns its historical defeat and moral collapse into a kitsch cult and political impotence.
Seeking shelter from the antiserbian Dukljan recoding of Montenegrin history and identity, the Serbian community has largely—and tragically—imprisoned itself in an artificially stoked Ravna Gora nostalgia which, by affirming collaboration with an occupying power on the model of the Second World War, cancels out any serious chance for a sober, modern, and emancipatory Serbian politics.
The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Place of Meaningless Politics
It should be stated plainly that Serbs in the larger Bosnian-Herzegovinian entity – the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (a composite, decentralized structure consisting of ten Bosniak, Croat, and mixed Bosniak–Croat cantons) – are most often reduced to two equally degrading roles. On the one hand, those who are politically active are largely turned into a client base of the Dodik’s SNSD: a kind of “diaspora” of Republika Srpska and Serbia inside their own birthplace, and as such they are pushed to the limits of political instrumentalization—most often as bargaining chips in arrangements with the Croatian Democratic Union of Bosnia and Herzegovina (HDZ BiH), led by figures who publicly posture as guardians of a Croatian neo-nazi tradition. On the other hand, those who do not fit into that framework often drift through life in anonymity and self-erasure, accepting Bosniak-nationalist and so-called “pro-Bosnian” narratives about themselves as the only permitted form of social existence. These narratives, as a rule, cast the Serbian people as intruders in their own country—an anomaly in Bosnian history—which, however absurd, becomes for many the only viable mode of survival.
Their political representatives are, to a significant extent, little more than individuals who opportunistically put their names and surnames into circulation: they say what the Bosniak majority wants to hear, rather than what the people they supposedly represent actually think, feel, and live through.
Serbs in Croatia: Guilty for Their Leftist Partisan Legacy
Serbs in Croatia today make up a minority of just over three percent of the population, demographically decimated by war, emigration, and assimilation, yet politically and symbolically subjected to an almost monstrous demonization by the Croatian right—with the tacit or half-hearted support of the ruling HDZ and a significant segment of the Roman Catholic Church. Though small in number, they remain a constant target of hate speech, revisionist narratives, and structural discrimination precisely because they carry the emancipatory legacy of the Second World War: the uprising against the Ustaša order and the idea of an antifascist Croatia. The fact that Serbs, together with Croatian antifascists, formed the backbone of resistance and the foundation of a different vision of Croatia makes them especially intolerable to the radical right today. They are not attacked as a real “threat”—they are, after all, already on the edge of disappearance—but as a living reminder that Croatian society contains a better, fairer, and more humane potential whose political articulation is meant to be suppressed.
Kosovo: Between Belgrade’s Compradors and Albanian Chauvinism
The position of Serbs in Kosovo today is shaped by a double pressure: on the one hand, Belgrade’s ongoing exploitation of their insecurity as a tool for masking the true nature of the regime in Belgrade; on the other, real fear and day-to-day tensions in their encounters with Albanian chauvinism and institutional coercion. Serbs—especially in the north—have for years lived in an atmosphere of recurring crisis: withdrawal from Kosovo’s institutions, election boycotts, the installation of mayors without genuine legitimacy, clashes with the police, and the closure of “parallel” Serbian institutions in coordination with the SNS regime—developments which, as both the OSCE and the EU have noted, have further undermined their access to salaries, pensions, and basic services.
It is precisely from this composite experience—revolt in Serbia as a hub of a broader system of managed dependence, lethargy in Republika Srpska, hollow elections in Montenegro, clientelization and self-erasure in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, demonization in Croatia, and the double pressure in Kosovo—that we should begin if we want to understand how the Serbian people are entering a multipolar world, and what any politics of emancipation could realistically mean under such conditions.
What could such a politics actually be?
A Croatian Member of the European Parliament, Tomislav Sokol, recently wrote—with a dose of contempt and racism—that “Serbian nationalism is forged from a mixture of Saint-Sava mythology and communist dogmas.” Yet if we strip that claim of its day-to-day political malice and read it seriously, it is precisely in that junction that one might discern the outline of a different, more elevated horizon—provided we also draw a clear line of distance both from “Svetosavlje” as seen through the Ljotićite lens and other currents of Serbia’s radical and neo-Nazi right, and from rigid Stalinist and Stalinist-adjacent understandings of communism. If we return the concept of Svetosavlje to its source, it becomes clear that the figure of Saint Sava—in its original historical and traditional meaning—can only be associated with universal Orthodoxy and with a Christian ethos of love, openness, and compassion toward every human being.
In the same way, the re-examination of communism that matters here cannot be a renewed cult of the state and the party, but rather a hunger for freedom and democracy—a striving for a society without the exploitation of human beings by human beings—along the lines recalled by liberation theology: sin begins as a “no” addressed to one’s neighbour, as self-deification that turns private interest into an idol, and then produces an order in which “the princes of this world” direct economic, cultural, and aesthetic currents in ways that inevitably oppress the poor and the dispossessed. (Enrique Dussel, Beyond Philosophy: Ethics, History, Marxism, and Liberation Theology, ed. Eduardo Mendieta (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003).)
A politics of emancipation for Serbs in a multipolar world crowded with predators and scavengers could—and must—mean a break with those idols, whether they come in the form of national chauvinism, Stalinist rigidity, or neoliberal servility, and a persistent “yes” addressed to one’s neighbour: the building of communities that defend both the survival of the people and the dignity of every human being—without hatred toward others and without submission to the logics of capital, empire, and domestic corruption.
In that sense, it is no accident that democracy proves to be modern humanity’s most important achievement—not as a mere ritual of turnout in elections that have already been stolen in advance, but as the hard-won, ongoing possibility for ordinary people to control power, replace it, and constrain it. Democracy has never been a gift: from the earliest citizens’ assemblies, through the bourgeois revolutions, the labour and trade-union movements, antifascist struggle, and decolonization, it has always arrived as the outcome of conflict with those who believed they had the right to decide on behalf of everyone. That is why it still makes sense to speak of democracy today only if we understand that it must be continually conquered—against the arbitrariness of the state, against the diktat of capital, against every ideology that would suspend, once and for all, the people’s capacity to say “no.”
Without that historical memory, invocations of democracy collapse into an empty formula—no less false on the lips of Brussels bureaucrats than on the lips of domestic authoritarian “patriots.” For all the groups of Serbs listed here—those in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia, and Kosovo—this kind of democracy, a “democracy of unceasing struggle,” is not merely one possible solution; it is the only framework capable of bringing them into a shared political story at all. It is the only point of convergence that does not demand that anyone renounce their identity, their homeland, or their historical experience, but instead asks for a minimum that constitutes human and political decency: that power be removable, accountable to citizens, that the law apply equally to all, and that the exploitation of human beings by human beings—and of peoples by peoples—be unacceptable.
And for that very reason, it is not a project that matters only for Serbs. A consistent, inclusive democracy—one that defends their right to survive and to have a voice—would at the same time strengthen everyone who lives with them and around them—Bosniaks, Croats, Albanians, Montenegrins, and others—because it offers the only realistic exit from the vicious circle of ethnic hierarchies and colonial tutelage.
A Major Rally That Deserves Global Attention
On 21 December, Novi Pazar—Serbia’s largest city with a Bosniak/Muslim majority—is set to host a major anti-government protest initiated by students of the State University in Novi Pazar, with students announced to be coming from Belgrade, Novi Sad, Kragujevac, and Niš as well. This is more than another date on the protest calendar: it is a public display of solidarity that cuts across the lines on which the region’s rulers have long tried to keep young people divided.
Its message is regional and unmistakable: the future will not be built by ethnic gatekeepers, clientelist parties, or imported “stability,” but by citizens who refuse to be managed as competing tribes. In that sense, the gathering in Novi Pazar also renews an old emancipatory maxim from early twentieth-century Serbian political thought—“The Balkans for the Balkan peoples”—not as a slogan of exclusion, but as a call for dignity, self-government, and mutual recognition in a space too often treated as someone else’s chessboard.
