If the so-called national sovereignty still makes sense at all and if some people can still, at least minimally, decide on their own destiny - then preserved peace is the most important act of Montenegrin sovereignty - assessed the philosopher and cultural theorist Boris Buden.
In an interview with "Vijesti" he said that it was difficult to do anything more than that in Montenegro, because it is the smallest "among the former Yugoslav states".
Speaking about the relationship of the European Union (EU) towards the Balkans, Buden said that the European center, in terms of the most powerful and richest states, or rather, their capitalist classes, treats the Balkans, apart from as a curse, mainly as a resource, primarily a qualified and educated workforce.
"This applies both to member states, Slovenia, Croatia, and especially Romania and Bulgaria, and to candidates, Serbia, Albania, etc.," he said, saying that the periphery outside the EU remains the periphery within the EU.
Buden announced that the arming of the former Yugoslav republics, as well as the arming of Europe and the world's leading powers, does not concern him, but rather fills him with impotent rage.
"This phenomenon of armament and remilitarization best shows where our nationalisms have led us, what fools they have made of us," the interlocutor emphasized.
How do Montenegro and its neighbors look to you from Berlin at the beginning of 2026, and how did they look to you while you were living here? What has changed for the better, what for the worse, what has remained the same, and what cannot and will never change?
I left something called the SFRY, and Montenegro was one of the six republics of the Yugoslav socialist federation. Since then, a lot has happened, but the most important thing is what did not happen - the war in Montenegro, the interethnic massacre and the very likely disintegration of the country. Hence my deep respect for all those who managed to preserve peace in one way or another, regardless of the shameful reservist excursions into Croatia.
If the so-called national sovereignty still makes sense at all, not only in our region, but globally, if a people can still, at least minimally, decide on their own destiny - then the preserved peace is the most important act of Montenegrin sovereignty. Could anything be more important than that? Hardly. Montenegro is the smallest of the former Yugoslav states... Seen from Berlin, where I live, it has a population smaller than two Berlin neighborhoods, mine and the neighboring one. But, on the other hand, as the saying goes: "Whoever says it, whoever lies, Montenegro is small. It is not small, it is not small! - It has not fought!" That is its greatness.
Do you think that identity conflicts in Montenegro are less real social conflicts and more instruments of political mobilization?
Identity conflicts are an integral part of our political, and thus social, reality. The fact that they are instrumentalized for the purpose of political mobilization does not make them any less real. No matter how fictitious these identities are, no matter how fabricated our national histories are, our supposedly unique cultures are artificially constructed, and our supposedly separate languages are too - the social effects of their political mobilization are real.
Just as a bad grade for a student who does not speak and write as prescribed by the recently constructed national language standard is real, and just as those graves in Srebrenica are real, no matter how trivial the question of whether someone eats this or that meat, or goes to this or that place of worship, may be in a social sense.
For almost forty years, our political elites have been drawing all their legitimacy, both social and historical, exclusively from identity politics, as ventriloquists for their nations. Let each of us judge for ourselves how happy they have made us.
How do you interpret the EU's relationship with the Balkans - as an announcement of fulfilling the promise of a "bright" future for the region or as a mechanism for permanently keeping it in a "waiting room" and in uncertainty?
The European center, in the sense of the most powerful and richest states, or rather their capitalist classes, treats the Balkans, apart from as a curse, mainly as a resource, primarily a qualified and educated workforce. This applies both to the member states, Slovenia, Croatia, and especially Romania and Bulgaria, and to the candidates, Serbia, Albania, etc.
For both, for example, they train more doctors and nurses than the European average, but in the end they have fewer than the same European average. The citizens of the Balkans, therefore, train health workers for Germany, for example. It is no wonder that German health care is then better than ours and will remain so. In short, the periphery outside the EU remains the periphery within the EU. Membership in the Union does not abolish power relations, domination, exploitation, hierarchy, but perpetuates them.
You wrote that the EU is nothing more than “another rather utopian project of post-national sovereignty that realistically suppresses the fact of new hierarchies, neo-feudal relations of direct dependence, the entire dialectic of winners and losers.” Why then did the local political classes, which at the beginning of the last decade of the last century sought to establish borders where there were none, soon afterwards rush to erase them within the EU?
A Europe without borders is a lie. Granted, within the Union, capital and labor move freely, but at whose expense? Wherever there is inequality, there are also borders - between those who profit and those who are profited from, between those who decide and those who are decided upon.
Our political elites, both those inside and outside the Union, serve as a transmission of power for the European elites, similar to the comprador elites in the colonial system. Their legitimation is simple: the EU has no alternative, on which, apparently, there is a consensus. But that is how neoliberal globalization was talked about until recently, about a world without borders that has no alternative. It was an illusion.
Today, protectionist economic policy, not only in Trump's America, raises borders even where they were unthinkable until yesterday. And those that already exist are turning into bloody front lines. While the EU boasts about freedom of movement without borders, it denies this same freedom to others in the most brutal way. The EU's external border is an instrument of blackmail, control, imposition of its own interests, and economic exploitation.
It is also a means, a weapon if you will, of illegal violence, human rights violations, literally a criminal creation. In the Mediterranean Sea alone, 30 thousand migrants have lost their lives in the last ten years, almost three and a half thousand of them children, and these are only registered deaths - the real number is much higher. For comparison, on the Berlin Wall, which was once considered a symbol of human rights violations, 140 people died in almost thirty years.
These were our people, innocent victims of communist totalitarianism. These people today are the others, we can leave them to drown, without responsibility, without remorse and without fear of punishment. They are to blame themselves, because for them freedom of movement does not apply. What is a European value for us, is a death sentence for them.
What is the future of the so-called Western Balkans if the EU is as you describe it?
There is no doubt about it. Since the political elites of the Western Balkans see no alternative to the EU, the future of the people on whose behalf they act will be as the political elites of the Union tailor it for them, in accordance with their own interests. That is where what benefits their profits will be produced, where personnel will be educated, and where the raw materials they need will be mined.
And if it is necessary to defeat China, which is the Union's declared goal by its quasi-foreign minister... Kaya Callas, then we will go to war against China. Which will, of course, be a real trifle for Montenegrins. Well, we learned that in school: “And in the hands of Mandušić Vuk, every drone will be deadly.” If the Chinese had read “Gorski vijenac”, they wouldn't be playing with us.
Are you concerned about the arming of these countries and to what extent?
The arming of our former Yugoslav states, as well as the arming of Europe and the world's leading powers, does not worry me, but rather fills me with impotent rage, especially when it comes to these parts of ours. This phenomenon of armament and remilitarization best shows where our nationalisms have led us, what fools they have made of us. Fools who directly and openly work against their own vital interests.
You've heard the joke: "When a Croatian 'Mirage' shoots down a Serbian one, then it's one zero for Croatia; when a Serbian one shoots down a Croatian one, then it's one zero for Serbia. In both cases, it's two zeros for France."
Recently, the German company “Rheinmetall” was declared the most profitable arms manufacturer in the world. Orders at the end of last year exceeded 60 billion euros. So, a cascade of German profits is flowing, and in it our small Croatian drop is also: Croatia has already signed a contract for 44 tanks worth 1,5 billion euros. In Germany, according to German prices and German standards, building a new kindergarten costs between 40 and 50 thousand euros per child.
So, for that money, Croatia, which is heading towards a demographic catastrophe, could build a new kindergarten place for every newborn child. But no, the Croatian media is jubilant, because Croatia is becoming a regional power, which, of course, worries Serbia. You could have better luck.
It is important to save German industry, which is no longer able to compete with the more technologically advanced and profitable Chinese industry. This is, in fact, racketeering. You cannot say no. This is the policy of the Union, of NATO. “Either pay or learn Russian,” as he said. Mark Rutte, NATO Secretary General, because, well, if we don't arm ourselves, the Russians will occupy all of Europe tomorrow. In the meantime, that same Europe is supplying weapons to Israel, politically and militarily supporting the genocide in Gaza. That is the logic of a bright European future: take away your own children in order to kill someone else's.
Which idea is closer to you - about the cyclicality or the unrepeatability of history in the Balkans? In that sense, are the 1990s over, or are we still living through their political and moral consequences?
The impression of cyclicality, or the constant repetition of history, is a characteristic of pre-modern historical temporality. Modern history, on the contrary, constantly produces new things, which is why today's children can no longer follow the example of older generations, or rather - the only thing they can still repeat are their stupidities and misconceptions.
The Balkans are no different in this regard. Although the thesis of the cyclical nature of history was ideologically abused by others who attributed our conflicts and wars of the 1990s to our primitive, Balkan, still uncivilized character - because if we were like them, we would not be breaking each other's heads, but would enjoy all the benefits of democracy and neoliberal capitalism in peace.
They instilled in us an inferiority complex, and our civic, liberal elites, racist and auto-racist as they are, eagerly helped them in this. As did our nationalists, who spent all their sovereignty precisely on voluntarily identifying with racist, Balkanist stereotypes - instead of realizing that in the nineties we were among the first to experience the coming European future.
I think that this is what the students in Serbia have understood, to the best of their ability. Namely, that they find themselves in an absolutely new situation in which no old recipes, no matter how liberal and democratic - and certainly not the existing political elites - can guarantee them, not simply a better future, but any future, bare survival in the face of the new threats they face, from the imminent danger of nuclear war, unstoppable global warming, the demographic collapse of the nation, the digital extinction of their language, the global insignificance of their supposedly unique cultural identities.
They have no one to learn from, so we should all learn from them. Their utopia is more instructive than our self-destructive reality.
What was most severely defeated in the breakup of Yugoslavia: social solidarity, the idea of equality, the possibility of a common future...?
As for the future, it will certainly be common, but what kind? It seems, certainly darker than the common past. With the collapse of Yugoslavia, our nations, paradoxically as it may sound, lost their sovereignty, and this sovereignty was reflected primarily in thinking for themselves, not only in favor of their own interests, but in favor of humanity; in not following some supposedly already existing values, such as European, Western, or as our bourgeois classes like to say - civilizational, but in articulating their own. What was the policy of non-alignment and peaceful existence, a delusion and nothing more?
What was so wrong, not to say totalitarian, in the idea of extending democracy, the right of people to decide their own destiny, to the field of work, that is, in the idea of self-management?
The time of kitschy Yugo-nostalgia, the illusion that an authentic culture of memory can somehow improve, enrich, and refine our social reality, is over. Now we need to seriously, that is, critically, analyze our historical experience, of course, beyond the current ruling ideology of neoliberal capitalism and representative democracy, which is already rapidly losing its prestige and is already collapsing on its right, so-called illiberal, side.
Mlađi istraživači su taj ozbiljni posao već započeli. Da spomenem samo novu knjigu Mislava Žitka i Marko Grdešić on the socialist economy of Yugoslavia, published in Great Britain. Pol Stabs from Zagreb, he edited a compilation on socialist Yugoslavia and the non-aligned movement, Vladimir Unkovski - Crust i Sasa Vejzagic they published a book about socialist entrepreneurs, a comparison of Yugoslav and East German socialism, both also in English. There is more, but the symbolic effect is important. Other people's cleverness has not gotten us anywhere, it is time to rely on our own.
How do you understand the return of religion to the socio-political space of post-Yugoslav countries? Is religion today, both here and in the world, more a means of control than a source of ethics and solidarity?
I have been repeating for about twenty years that faith has not returned to where it was before socialist secularism. Even less is it about its victory over atheism. The truth is exactly the opposite - what we have been witnessing for decades is the radical atheization of faith itself.
Statistics mislead us. The illusion that atheists have all but disappeared comes from looking for them in the wrong place. There they are in church, behind the altar, from where they preach everything except religion itself, which they have reduced to the supposed essence of cultural, national identity, to an instrument of the struggle for political power and class privileges.
In a church in Šibenik, they decorated a nativity scene for Christmas, celebrating the birth of Jesus, with HOS (Croatian Defense Forces) flags, with "For the Homeland - Ready!", with the story of Sutjeska where the partisans had Dalmatians killed, about those partisans who, disguised in Ustasha uniforms, committed crimes, etc.
In short, Jesus was born an Ustasha. As a convinced atheist, such blasphemy would never occur to me. I believe in faith, in its authenticity, precisely as an atheist, more than the entire clergy of the Croatian Catholic Church. Shame! They sold God for Ante Pavelic and real estate.
You recently stated that the moral debacles of Europe and the West have accumulated so much that today anyone who still claims that in a moral and normative sense we can look up to Europe or, say, Germany - is completely uninformed. If Europe has lost the moral authority that legitimized its political and civilizational supremacy for decades, what does its power rest on today? How is it possible for the West to ignore what is happening every day in Gaza?
The West is not ignoring the genocide in Gaza, but is supporting it politically, economically and militarily. The West is not a silent witness, but an accomplice in the crime. Which is completely transparent. Gaza is like an aquarium in the living room of the West in which the household barely pays attention to what is happening inside, because what must happen is happening - the big fish devours the small one. Big deal.
The question is why we even believed in the moral, cultural, ideological and any other superiority of that identity, normative bloc, which we call the West, and which no one knows what it is. It is certainly not a democracy, but it is the place where world wars, colonialism, Auschwitz, exploitation and destruction of nature were started.
How could we be blind to such stark facts? Just as we are blind to Gaza. And just as stupid as we are when to every question we are asked, we have a ready answer - Europe!
Finally, the belief that power is behind everything, a naked force that has remained intact beneath the moral and ideological debacle, is also an illusion. That power is drying up before our eyes, which makes it even more dangerous. Isn't the remilitarization and warmongering propaganda that is spreading across Europe today a logical continuation of the aggressive neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state? Isn't war a logical continuation of criminal violence on the external borders of Europe and the West?
In a recent interview, you said that liberal democracy is in such a crisis that “descending into chaos” can only be prevented by establishing a radically new politics. Who can establish it and how, and what should that new politics be? Where is the left today and what is its future?
The left has been completely defeated, which is good news, but only for the right, not for the world as such. And as it is, it has no future. Which is also good news, because it has become obvious that it must, so to speak, reinvent itself.
It cannot be renewed within the existing liberal democratic horizon, in the sense of more of the same, more minority and human rights, more 'Woke' politics, more women in politics and the public sphere, more pride parades, a culture of remembrance, schools of tolerance, etc. From all of this, we have only gotten less.
Take the case of migrants. Today, the entire European political spectrum is being redesigned on this issue. Naked populist racism has deeply gripped the very parliamentary center, while the left helplessly calls for more tolerance.
But what if it is only a matter of time before those we are pushing to their deaths at our borders, those who already have nothing to lose but their heads, will turn into a political subject who not only politically articulates their rights, but fights for them and ultimately overthrows the order that tramples on those rights? Maybe they will soon sing to us under our windows “Down with force and injustice!” And maybe the future of the left lies in joining them, instead of politically disarming and pacifying them with its humanitarian, integrationist paternalism?
If the West is where you see it, then where is the East, and what is the perspective of the European East in the West?
Eastern Europe does not exist as a geographical or political concept. It is not a territory but an ideologeme, coined during the Cold War as the other of the West to be defeated and conquered. After that happened, the East survived as the “former East”, as the “former East”, perpetuating and multiplying the Cold War border, now, as I said, as a resource of cheap labor and raw materials.
And as a dumping ground for European, Western, moral, racist, ideological garbage. When people die in a pond fire in Macedonia, it's corruption, endemic in Eastern Europe. When it happens in Switzerland, it's a disaster.
Why the outrage over what's happening in Croatia, it's in the EU
How do you interpret the latest developments in Croatia - Thompson's concert in Zagreb, a rally in Parliament at which the crimes in Jasenovac were denied, the cancellation of the Days of Serbian Culture program in Split...?
I don't understand why everyone around Croatia, especially those in the east of the former Yugoslavia, is so excited about it. After all, Croatia is in the European Union.
The fascist salute has been legalized in the public sphere of a member state of the Union, hundreds of thousands of people chant it at a concert held within that same Union, it has been normalized in the parliament of that member state of the Union, the same parliament that denies the Holocaust.
The Prime Minister who openly supports and enables all this is a respected European politician, and his party's representatives sit in the European Parliament on the benches of the most respected parties of the democratic center. So why the outrage? Welcome to the European Union! For home!
Your book "Barricades" is one of the most important books published in the 1990s, analyzing the breakup of Yugoslavia and calling for rebellion against inhumanity. Do you see more or less reason for rebellion today than you did then? Who should lead that rebellion today, how, under what conditions, and on what ideological grounds, and is it even possible? You were once a columnist and editor at Arkzine, a media outlet known for its radical criticism and independent approach. How do you see the possibility of creating a similar space for intellectual and political rebellion in post-Yugoslav societies today?
"Arkzin" and my book were created in that other, bygone time, those war-torn nineties, when there was faith that liberal democracy and, so to speak, tamed capitalism would ultimately ensure peace, tolerance, relative economic prosperity, and cultural and social progress.
At the time, it seemed that these were the authentic values of Europe and the so-called West, and nationalism and ethnic exclusivity were their and our common enemies.
At the time, it seemed that these were also the interests of Western humanitarian foundations that supported us, that their goal was the spread of democracy and liberal ideas, and not, say, regime change in imperial interests.
Today, all of that has been stripped to the bone. There are no more illusions. The interest of political and economic dominance is what it is and nothing more.
The entire cultural and ideological superstructure is increasingly being rejected as superfluous decoration. Therefore, the conditions for rebellion are different.
Then it seemed that the main problem was our primitive, aggressive nationalisms, and that democracy or, even more naively, civilization, were the solutions that would sooner or later prevail. Today, the problem is this democracy itself, or rather, the so-called civilization, in its contradictions, instrumentalizations, and manipulations.
The solution, or rather the rebellion, must be articulated today beyond their horizon.
And the stakes are much higher. It is not about pacifying and democratizing, let alone civilizing, the supposedly wild Balkans.
The fate of humanity is at stake, no less. And it would be good if it wasn't always decided by others, besides us.
Bonus video:
