Notes on the Serbian student movement
As in many other regional cases, most notably in Hungary, Poland, or Romania, the commonplace framing of the recent protests in Serbia by Western analysts revolves around the protesters’ anti-corruption demands and demands for the rule of law. The baffled Western—oftentimes liberal—mind cannot comprehend why such disenfranchised people would elect, yet again, a strongman whose corrupt government causes them harm. At best, such analysts try to veil their judgement by pointing to the allegedly historically contingent lack of democratic traditions and rule of law in the Balkans. The region, with its potent political imagery, remains a looming explanatory device, even when not employed verbatim. At worst, they would simply resort to explaining the local political culture as one that inherently prefers strongmen. What can be done—they say, tapping themselves on the back—when the locals continuously keep electing figures who will eventually work to their own detriment. Subjecting local socio-political conditions to the normative measuring stick of “democracy and rule of law” that they designed, for decades on end, they sigh when revising the results of their efforts to instil values of liberal democracy into these seemingly struggling political communities. Somehow these Balkan peoples still cannot catch up with modern political standards.
Yet, these reductivist notions of democracy and rule of law rarely take into account crucial economic inter-dependencies between Europe’s core and peripheral economies. The effects of Balkan polities’ peripheral position, nevertheless, remain painfully tangible in the local context. From the fact that EU leaders routinely ignore blatantly manipulated elections to the exploitation of Serbia’s natural resources while gravely disregarding ecological standards in the name of The European Green Deal and, most visibly, to the continuous waves of labor migration on which EU’s core economies depend—peripheral conditions are part and parcel of the lived experience of the vast majority of the local population.
Western media coverage: Useful idiots or wilful propagandists?
In a country grappling with weak rule of law, many seek freedom from a government long seen as authoritarian (…) According to scholars, international observers and advocacy organisations, Serbia has long grappled with a weak rule of law, which is undermined by endemic corruption, political interference, fraudulent elections, and severe restrictions on independent media. (Ingrid Gercama for The Guardian, January 30, 2025)
The collapse of the huge concrete structure on 1 November sparked a wide anti-corruption movement and months of student-led street protests against the authorities in the Western Balkan country. Many in Serbia believe that the collapse was caused by systemic corruption in large infrastructure projects, particularly those involving Chinese companies. Critics believe graft led to a sloppy job during the reconstruction of the Novi Sad train station, poor oversight and disrespect of existing safety regulations. The issue has come to symbolise a wider discontent over the state of the rule of law in Serbia. (Gavin Blackburn for Euronews, February 1, 2025)
Les étudiants serbes réclament justice pour l’accident de Novi Sad, dénonçant la corruption et la négligence des autorités sous la présidence d’Aleksandar Vucic. (Le Monde, January 27, 2025)
Ce mouvement de contestation contre la corruption et pour un État de droit, initié par les étudiants il y a quatre mois, est loin de s’essouffler et semble faire trembler le président Vucic au pouvoir depuis 13 ans, pour la première fois. (…) Depuis le début du mouvement anticorruption en novembre, environ 70 incidents violents ont eu lieu, toujours contre les étudiants, qui ont toujours réussi à rester pacifiques. (…) Cette catastrophe a provoqué une onde de choc révélant l’incurie, la corruption et les défaillances des institutions. (rfi, March 14, 2025)
Die Teilnehmer der Proteste machen die Korruption der Regierenden unter dem teils autoritär herrschenden Präsidenten Aleksandar Vučić für das Unglück in Novi Sad verantwortlich. Der Bahnhof war kurz davor umgebaut worden. Sie fordern aber nicht den Rücktritt von Politikern, sondern die konsequente Durchsetzung von Rechtsstaatlichkeit und die Bestrafung von korrupten Akteuren. (Spiegel, March 13, 2025)
Most coverage on the Serbian student movement in the European mediascape, as can be seen from these quotes, relies on democracy and rule of law-centered arguments, in an implicitly orientalist key. A small Balkan nation, burdened by history—meaning, “with an underdeveloped political culture”—grapples with a corrupt government that, this time, cost some of them their lives. If only they had Europeanized in time! The European Chief Prosecutor, Laura Codruța Kövesi, who promised to (only) investigate the potential misuse of EU funds in this case, also nominally supported the student protests by employing an anti-corruption framing of the situation.
In fact, what many in the Western media overemphasized was that the companies that took part in the controversial renovation of the Novi Sad train station were Chinese and Hungarian subcontractors—likely signaling shady business, thus rendering the case closed. What is often less problematized is the fact that the tender was in fact won by Starting, a controversial and immensely profitable construction company known for working on the other side of the law, which means the government should have been aware of potentially serious issues with its execution.
In fact, when reluctant to employ such arguments or language directly, European media resorts to citing students who reproduce these tropes, not least because they themselves are under the spell of messages arriving from the EU’s core economies. What such representation of events does is not only extremely intellectually lazy, but is, in fact, dangerously obscuring the underlying systemic conditions that led to the Novi Sad tragedy and the consequent protests that have the potential to ask much larger and more pertinent questions about the nature of the European project. These are the questions on the effects of peripherality onto the local population and, more broadly, core-periphery relations on the European continent. Importantly, in Eastern and Southern Europe these questions have been so far largely monopolized by the right or extreme right. Yet, when Viktor Orbán criticizes “Brussels,” it is dismissed as populism rooted in illiberalism, rather than also a discourse designed to tackle the lived experience of being a second-class EU citizen. Even if these systemic conditions are evident to the broadly conceived left, they are definitely not perceived by the liberal mainstream, which still insists on a normative understanding of the European project across the board. And it is the latter that is still dominant in framing the narrative around the developments in Serbia.
Democracy and economic dependencies: Recognizing their entanglement in core and peripheral contexts
Western observers are not alone in their reductivist perspective. To many people in Serbia, the Novi Sad tragedy is something that “could only happen here,” that “could only happen to us,” and essentially a local issue for which only they can be responsible and which they are called upon to resolve. The so-called “second Serbia” (druga Srbija)—namely, liberal and pro-EU intellectuals and intelligentsia—still awaits the assistance of EU bodies and interventions that would put the Vučić government in its place. Those oftentimes younger generations who bought into the ethnonationalist framing of their elders’ trauma can only rely on an autochtonist language to reject different hegemonies, not least because there largely aren’t any other languages available. They believe their ancestors brought down the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, and they see the Yugoslav experiment as inherently tainted and ultimately destroyed by Vatican-directed Croats, with the help of malicious outside forces. This leaves the Serbian parochial community as a single symbolic, quasi-historical device that emulates not only their alleged ethnic character, but also political values that can resist the peripheral condition with all its uncertainties and precarities.
The left discourse that would frame this condition in more systemic, analytical, and most importantly, less essentialist terms, while present and well-articulated in rising regional media outlets, remains relatively marginal in the European and global public space, likely because the local liberal oppositional elite still holds hopes towards the EU and the West more broadly. At the same time, the populist right has long co-opted the language of the economic resilience of the periphery by employing the historical-cultural imagery of local peasant communes (e.g., zadruga) or of nominally horizontal and democratic, even if not liberal, citizens’ assemblies (e.g., zborovi). The Western media coverage is, thus, an outcome of its unwillingness to acknowledge these core-periphery dependencies, but also of the local actors’ lack of problematization of these dependencies in a way that would go beyond “corruption” as a characteristic of the essentialized “local” conditions.
In order to reframe the Serbian student movement, a task that is increasingly becoming a matter of life and death given the escalation of violence against its participants and against the Serbian population more broadly, it is necessary to insist on the connection between democracy and economic dependencies. In other words, it is necessary to acknowledge that the EU’s core economies very much benefit from and simply depend on “stabilitocracy” to ensure their economic growth. For the regular replenishing of the workforce, primarily in Germany, but also in other core-economies of the EU, it is necessary to sustain the brain drain, but also what could be called the “muscle drain” from places such as Serbia, the post-Yugoslav space more broadly, and other places within EU, such as Hungary and Romania. For Germany’s and other core economies’ investments into such places where cheap labor and infrastructure are available, their political partners in the region must ensure “stable” conditions on the ground. This is well exemplified by Angela Merkel’s appeasement of Orbán, which enabled the growth of the German car industry. The fact that Chinese elites, and Bank of China more broadly, also understood the benefits of exploiting local conditions, particularly in relation to environmental standards, is also visible in the region. In Hungary, for instance, this was the case with battery factories, and in Serbia with the infamous Linglong tire factory that also happens to produce for Volkswagen. What is European politicians’ alarmism around Chinese investment strategies or democratic deficiencies worth, when they are doing the very same to their own neighborhood or inner periphery, sustaining similar political conditions that occasionally murder the working people?
The benefit of investing in a “stabilitocracy,” in addition to the less regulated working conditions and the cheaper price of labor and infrastructure, is the local context’s relative invisibility in the societies of the economic core. This is the result of the lack of analytical media coverage on the issues faced by the peripheries, as well as of the media’s mis-framing of local tragedies as results of corrupt local governments. The official discourse that focuses solely on democratic norms, the democratic process, and the rule of law often obscures the very tangible economic dependencies that work at the detriment of contexts such as the Serbian one. Yet, these autocrats and their mafia milieus rarely face any real consequences. In fact, sometimes those who oppose them do, as, for example, in the case of the expulsion of Hungarian universities from Erasmus.
But what would happen if what the EU frames as the rule of law would be achieved in Serbia? Would this lend more power to a highly precarious population, posing a threat to the exploitative arrangements on which investments into Serbia rely? Would this affect the growth of EU’s core economies? Are democratic processes in peripheral contexts a threat to capital by empowering the most vulnerable and exploited layers of society?
Perspectives “from below”
The exploited, however, are not naive. They are often well aware of these dependencies, given they have the lived experience of labor migrations, toxic effects of relocated production onto their environments and societies—as in the case of Rio Tinto or Linglong—and perhaps most importantly: of the impasse in which they find themselves politically. Whom can they appeal to? To their autocratic leaders and their machinery who did everything in their power, overtly or covertly, to put them in their place? To core EU countries whose elites and state economies benefit from and essentially rely on their subjugatedness?
Those working people who are not blackmailed, excluded, impoverished, or bullied out of the country can stay in Serbia and continue working in diapers, or hoping that the train station canopies don’t collapse onto their heads during their morning commutes. Others should be grateful for the opportunity, sometimes offered through intermediaries such as temp agencies, to be economic migrants in Germany, Austria, and other EU economies, grateful for the fact that they are the better, namely white and Christian, kind of labor migrants.
Among other questions, the student movement raised that of the political responsibility for the Novi Sad train station tragedy—through their demand to disclose the documentation pertaining to its controversial renovation—as well as for investigation into the violence on part of the official law enforcement and less official government-backed thugs who beat the protesting students. Later, they also demanded investigation of the March 15 incident, when the government likely used a sonic weapon against peaceful protesters.
The unwillingness to meaningfully address these questions and demands posed by the student movement and the Novi Sad tragedy was more than obvious in the open letter issued by the EU Commissioner for Enlargement, Marta Kos. Concerns were expressed, the importance of key democratic values highlighted, and the usual carrot stick of EU membership waved. But real consequences for the autocrat who violently abuses the rights of Serbia’s citizens are not on the horizon, nor are there actors in the core economies who feel responsible in the least. Instead, statements such as Kos’s and the Western media reporting on Serbia are putting great efforts into placing the proverbial ball into the court of Serbia’s population, knowing full well this might result in more victims—not of Vučić’s forces, but of the continued peripherality from which the EU is directly benefiting. It is time to acknowledge that by insisting on this approach, EU cannot be considered better than Russia, China, or the US for the people of Southeast Europe.
The otherwise much maligned “right” and “left,” who are (even if vastly disproportionately) steadily growing at the expense of the liberal mainstream in Europe and beyond, are both aware that there is second-class citizenry in the EU and its candidate states. The right is directly capitalizing on that experience and on the liberal mainstreams’ inability to renegotiate the European social contract. In other words, given the most recent developments internationally and on the continent, the liberal institutional machinery of the EU (both as a union and on the level of member-states) risks jeopardizing its existence, and potentially, peace, if it does not show readiness for taking into account the political and economic needs of the peripheries. This lack of renegotiation of the European social contract is not only costing the people of Serbia their lives, but all of the people on the European peripheries (in and outside EU) their dignity and health. What might be the result of all this is not only the straining of the economic levers between core and periphery, but also the final and complete erosion, in all European contexts, of the nominally liberal institutions that the EU states share (parliaments, constitutions, judiciaries), which in theory are designed to serve and protect citizens from both autocracy and market. In other words, what is at stake is not only the project of a European union, but of the liberal state more broadly.
Conclusion: Towards a vision for the new European social contract?
For all the reasons stated above, particularly the fact that the discussion on the axis democracy-corruption does not acknowledge economic dependencies, I believe it is necessary for the left to demand a renegotiation of the European social contract, between members and non-members alike, and to propose a vision for a new, more horizontal European arrangement. The tragedy that took place in Serbia, but also those that occur on a smaller scale daily on the European peripheries, demonstrate what happens when these dependencies remain unaddressed. Crucially, this vision should not serve to reify fortress Europe, but would still promote autarchy in the expanded EU, so as to decrease global economic-political dependencies and drastically lessen the extent to which it sustains hierarchical, core-periphery relations across the globe as well, even at the cost of dramatic economic transformation. To conclude, I point to several implications of this, which I believe should be more broadly debated and considered on the left.
Starting from the understanding that we are now, more than ever in recent history, directed at mutual cooperation, the need for inter-European relations to improve and the radical redefinition of our common goals for the future should be raised. If EU is to truly and not just nominally be a political project, rather than an unequal economic one, then the conditions that produce second-class citizenry should be eradicated. To be able to resist the rapidly growing security and economic challenges faced by Europe today, internal inequalities also need to be tackled—North, East, West, and South. This includes all forms of formal and informal extractivism and exploitation of existing inequalities, particularly in terms of labor and natural resources. The thinly veiled neo-colonial approaches towards the European East and South must be abolished.
As I have argued, a key starting point would be to stop disjointing democracy (rule of law) from economic dependencies. When used by decision-makers and observers, the concept of democracy needs to be redefined, so as to inherently include economic and political resilience of the given population, while the importance of the tenets of the electoral cycle need to be diminished in favor of the former. In other words, the criteria for judging a society democratic should concentrate around the strength of labor rights and economic prosperity of individuals, together with other, more explicitly political criteria that are considered standard, such as free media, freedom of expression and gathering, civil society, etc. In order to redefine this, the number of electoral cycles should be lowered, while the measures to increase economic and political resilience of the population should be increased. The constant participation in ever more meaningless electoral politics weakens political systems in the long term and draws the populations’ attention away from conditions that underpin democracy, such as media literacy and financial stability.
Moreover, what would strengthen this new arrangement would be the immediate acceptance of the Western Balkans into the European Union, as well as of Moldova and Georgia. Continuing to see them as buffer zones can only lead to another war akin to that in Ukraine, but economic integration needs to happen on equitable terms. Based on the understanding that EU has outgrown the Franco-German peace and economic development project of the past century, the left should discuss and consider a vision of a centralized supranational entity that economically relies on its own labor and resources in most spheres of economic activity. Without the change in the underlying conditions that produce the challenges faced on the European continent—namely, economic dependencies rooted in inequalities and the corruptibility of democratic processes— both its cores and peripheries remain at the mercy of those who imagine themselves to be Great Powers, able to divide and subject them to oblivion.
The current situation in Serbia and the political impasse in which it finds itself is but one, if very tragic, variation on the theme of peripherality. But the fact that elections have lost absolutely all legitimacy, as did the political opposition to Vučić, and that students, who cannot stop protesting because of the likely retaliations, overtly spell out the end of representative democracy since they witnessed its limitations in the peripheral context, all go to show that a solution cannot be a local one. Instead, it must involve the creation of transnational, and primarily transperipheral, solidarities, and consequently the formulation of demands that tackle systemic rather than merely local conditions. To rephrase Miljenko Jergović’s reading of another tragedy of our time, Should the canopy collapse onto the people of Novi Sad, it will collapse onto all of us.
Svjetlana Ribarević is a pseudonym for a researcher of modern history of the region who published on political ideas and the social history of 20th century Yugoslavia and Hungary.