What's Happening in Serbia?

Democratic Inspiration, and the Social Contract of The Upside Down

Something fascinating is happening in Serbia. On Saturday, about 325,000 people, roughly 5% of the country’s total population, took to the streets of the capital, Belgrade, in anti-corruption and pro-democracy protests. There were many speeches, some quoting Plato and Aristotle, there was tasteful choir music, appealing pop-up food, and an attempted fifteen minute silence that appears to have been interrupted by the police. There were no flags from other places: EU, Russia, Ukraine, US, China, though Serbia is important to all of them. This is a movement of, by and for the people; a nation rediscovering itself. At a time when Trump and Putin are always in the headlines, Serbia’s new democratic movement exists as a microcosm of the worldwide struggle to challenge dictatorship and it appears to be doing something right. We should look and learn.¹

The student-led movement is resilient partly because it is leaderless by design - it is not so easy to ‘cut off the head’ of a regenerative organism that does not depend on any single person or even a small group of figureheads.

The movement is also steadfastly unaligned with any political party and has no policy prospectus; it is a para-political movement for functional governance, not a movement for a change in the law or the party of government.²

While Serbia’s democratic movement does have some of France’s soixante-huitardism, the movement seems calmer, and it has intergenerational support and ex-establishemt backing including retired military. It also appears Gandhian in its satyagraha ethos and disciplined non-violence, including long pilgrimage-like walks from the hinterlands of Serbia into the big cities. It can be seen as an example of youth-led prefigurative culture that I highlighted recently, and I also sense latent elements of Vaclav Havel’s belief in the power of the powerless to create a parallel polis, though that may be downstream. There have been no Tiananmen square tank-man-moments yet, but a similar spirit of standing against the state machine prevails. In fact, one of the main phrases of the movement is the elegant “Mechanical Engineers against The Machine”.

The message on the white banner can be translated as “Mechanical engineers against the machine” though I am told that in Serbian it is ‘against the machinery’ which carries a similar meaning.

What do all these people want? That’s what I find most interesting. Their demand can be misunderstood as the conventional desire for their President to resign or for justice to be given to people killed through negligence, but that’s not really what’s going on. The real demand is altogether more intelligent, terrifying for those in power, and it is apparently modest, namely this:

Can you please ensure that our institutions work as they are supposed to?

I suspect the reason developments in Serbia are not currently breaking into Western media as much as they should be is that - like all the best stories - their case is complex, and very particular.

Serbia is a landlocked country of about 6.6 million people bordered by eight(!) others (Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo or Albania) and some believe civilisation began there. Serbia is a difficult place to understand quickly because it is full of cross-currents, shifting allegiances and contested history relating to the formation and break up of the former Yugoslavia and subsequent civil war. I have however learned just enough about Southeastern and Central Europe to know this: World War One began in 1914 after an Archduke from Austro-Hungary was assassinated in Sarajevo by a Bosnian-Serb nationalist, and not, as Baldrick suggested in Blackadder: “When a bloke called Archie Duke shot an ostrich because he was hungry”…³

For three hours on Saturday afternoon, I felt like I was in Serbia. In fact I was in Putney, Southwest London, but I was invited into a house where Serbian television was playing live news of the protest and I watched it with occasional simultaneous translations from the parents of my younger son’s closest school friend. It was a privilege to be with them - Vasa and Milja - as history in their home country was unfolding, and to hear their take on what is happening there. And there was a little bonus of Serbian plum brandy at some point, so all-in-all an unexpectedly charming afternoon.

It appears Serbia’s dictatorial President Aleksandar Vučić exceeds his constitutional mandate to a comical extent, such that while he should function like the UK’s constitutional monarch King Charles, he acts more like Russia’s de-facto autocrat, Vladimir Putin. This executive overreach is often a symptom of corruption, which is indeed very high in Serbia. Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) indicated a 35/100 score for Serbia’s transparency in 2024 which signifies institutionalised corruption. When corruption is that high, it has a cooling effect on foreign investment, it has delayed Serbia’s accession to the EU, and it has eroded public trust. When a state functions not on competence and accountability but on loyalty, favours and bribes, it gets weaker over time. Serbian parents often have to put up with bad teachers for their children to keep local politicians happy, for instance.

That’s just an outline of the context, but it helps explain the significance of the event that precipitated the protests. ​On November 1, 2024, a tragic incident occurred at the Novi Sad railway station, where a recently renovated concrete and steel canopy collapsed, resulting in the deaths of fifteen people. ​It was to commemorate those deaths that the event was held on March 15, and collective 15-minute silences have become a national practice (which is fascinating in itself). The government would like to frame the accident as an unfortunate technical mistake and close the matter by saying the engineers and builders will be suitably dealt with. Impressively, civil society has seen through that, and turned proper accountability for the accident into a democratic touchstone.

**

There will be details I don’t know about, but the case is something like this:

Whose responsibility is it ultimately that the canopy of a public station is safe - who signs it off? The public authorities.

And why might the renovation not have been done properly? Cutting corners is the hallmark of corrupt systems that seek profit over safety, and they didn’t appoint suitably qualified people to do it.⁴

And why was the renovation not officially signed off as safe? The relevant authorities did not understand, were not paying attention, or did not allow themselves to care.

So what does the Novi Sad Canopy collapse signify? An unfortunate accident?

No. Endemic corruption. Systemic risk. A need for fundamental change.

One of the motto’s of the movement is that “We are all under the canopy”. This is a movement slogan but it is philosophically charged because ‘canopy’ is another word for social imaginary, which Charles Taylor calls “The widest possible grasp of our whole predicament”. Canopy elicits this broader idea of shared reality, which is arguably an essential feature of a viable democracy, and precisely what anti-democratic forces seek to undermine. When a canopy collapses - literally and figuratively - the spirit of democracy collapses with it.

I don’t pretend to understand Serbia’s political sociology well, and it appears to be hard for anyone to say what will happen next. Vučić may follow the example of Lukashenko in Belarus, and simply wait for the protests to run out of steam while also becoming more oppressive. Or this may prove to be like Ukraine’s ‘Revolution of Dignity’ or The Maidan Revolution that succeeded in removing a problematic leader and moved the country away from Russia and towards the EU (but also became part of the context used by Russia - unreasonably in my view - to justify its invasion of Crimea and later full-scale invasion of Ukraine).

It looks like the government is deliberately trying to sabotage the protests, to make them turn violent and justify, for instance, martial law, but there are some who believe Vučić is so deluded that he sees himself as a defender of democracy so very little is clear. In the meantime, the police feel a bit caught in the middle, and (sound canon controversy aside) they did an extraordinary job yesterday of keeping the protest peaceful with timely crowd control interventions, including moving people away from the main government buildings as it began to get dark. The army is not yet involved, and the prevailing assumption is that they don’t want to be.

It feels like the movement will need wins of some kind before long to maintain momentum. I am reminded of a line from the 1982 film Gandhi that sounds authentic, though there is no historical record of Mahatma Gandhi saying it:

The function of a civil resistance is to provoke response and we will continue to provoke until they respond or change the law.

The protestors are asking for a proper inquiry into what happened, and accountability for those responsible. And here ‘proper’ is where the request for institutions to function as they should kicks in. The details are beyond my knowledge and my current capacity to acquire it, but it appears that there is no way for the government to create that kind of process without unravelling. The request to function transparently and with due process is a fatal threat to a regime that depends on secrecy and bribes. The spirit of a transparent investigation has to be allowed to follow its leads, and genuine accountability means scapegoat mechanisms won’t work, so any truth-revealing process will be extensive and expansive and absolutely devastating for the current corrupt regime because it will indicate how rotten the whole thing is.

And yet, there is a need for some caution. When corruption is endemic it is also a kind of adhesive that holds things together, and that applies especially to the leader, in this case Vučić. In Serbia there is a social contract of sorts - broadly the consent to be governed in return for protections. It is flawed and corrupt, but it is also established and understood and overall the country, while not a beacon of democracy and prosperity, is mostly functional, and for many, simply home. Some Serbs are scared of what will follow if the regime collapses too quickly.

Yet what the mass movement has revealed is that two types of reality are co-existing in one country. There are ostensibly democratic institutions that don’t actually work as such, because they are not given a chance to, and there is a corrupt authoritarian government that ‘works’ in a manner of speaking, but looks increasingly illegitimate and brittle. If the current regime collapses, the entire social contract might collapse with it. Given Serbia’s complex history, with many dark chapters, and quite a lot of guns, there is little appetite for social breakdown.

While looking for a metaphor to make sense of this predicament of two parallel realities co-existing - things as they are ostensibly and things as they really are - I thought of the Netflix series Stranger Things, which I have watched with my sons. A key feature of that world of Hawkins, Indiana, is that it contains ‘The Upside Down’ which is glimpsed in this short one-minute clip:

I am not saying Serbia has a government of The Upside Down as such, but it is not a bad way to think of it. The Upside Down is a parallel dimension that looks like the real thing but is dark (lacking transparency) decayed (corrupted), and overrun by monstrous creatures (officials abusing power), including the demogorgon (the President). The Upside Down features recognisable objects but they are covered in spores, vines and eerie lighting (things that should work but don’t). The creatures in the upside down are connected by a hive mind (“this is how we do things”). There are very few entries to the upside down (a disaster can create one). Still, they increase in number over time (hence the need to avert the next disaster) almost as if The Upside Down has imperial ambitions to colonise the real world (hence the need for protests to uphold democracy).⁵

I am partly joking. But I find this way of thinking about Serbia useful for teasing out the broader implications of what is happening there for democracy more generally.

The Serbian student protestors are saying: We don’t want to live in The Upside Down.

And in the US today, citizens are saying: We don’t want to live in The Upside Down.

As Ukraine resists Russia, it says: We don’t want to live in the The Upside Down.

When we fight for ecological viability, we say: We don’t want to live in The Upside Down.

In response, corrupted powers will always say: There, there. What are you talking about? There is no Upside Down.

But we know there is.

And it’s up to us to get back to our shared reality, where things work, make sense, and we can trust each other and breathe more easily.

1. The crowd figures come via the Public Meeting Archive and the BBC. It is still not clear what exactly ended the 15 minute silence, but it appears it may have been ‘a sound canon’ which is a sonic weapon that is not legally sanctioned for use. The speech that quoted Plato and Aristotle is here.

2. In Three Horizon Terms, this is a battle for a functional first horizon as a precondition for anything that might work in the second or third.

3. I spent many happy weeks with my first girlfriend at her family restaurant in rural Slovenia in the late nineties, and I even learned a little Slovene. My heart was soon to be broken, but I returned to that vicinity of the world to win a chess tournament in Pula, Croatia, in 2002, and I visited Sarajevo’s ‘tunnel of hope’ in Bosnia as part of my Open Society Fellowship on human rights in 2017. Montenegro I know merely as a curious word, (North) Macedonia I know for Alexander the Great and for not being Greece, and Kosovo for its struggle for statehood. I was aware of the Balkan wars throughout most of the nineties and even became a little wary of Serbia in the process, though not based on any deep understanding

4. For a great dramatisation of this idea, I can warmly reccomend Toxic Town, a four-part series currently available on Netflix.

5. I am not sure if there has been any proper cultural analysis of The Upside Down as an idea, but it clearly has elements of the unconscious perhaps even Jung’s collective unconscious, it represents unknown causal powers, it is about the destruction of nature and a manifestation of collective anxieties. Ontologically, it can be thought of as a parallel reality in a kind of multiverse though perhaps without its own flow of time, it could also be seen as a version of Plato’s Cave - a profoundly limited perception of reality. And of course it’s a kind of metaphysical hell in which we are cut off from the reality we seek to return to, filled with suffering, decay, and torment.