Fifth Regional Plenum Quo vadis, Balkan? in Sarajevo: Civic Values and the Region – How Far Have We Come?
The Fifth Regional Plenum “Quo vadis, Balkan?” is being held in Sarajevo from June 6 to June 8. As in previous years, it gathers a significant number of experts, officials, organizations, academic and state institutions, decision-makers, as well as media representatives, diplomatic envoys, and the academic community.
This year, the partner organizations of the Regional Academy for Democratic Development from Novi Sad and the Center for Civic Education from Podgorica in organizing the Plenum are the Faculty of Political Sciences of the University of Sarajevo, with support from the European Fund for the Balkans. The Regional Plenum “Quo vadis, Balkan?” is one of the most significant regional initiatives bringing together prominent civil society organizations, experts, and activists focusing on democracy, reconciliation, and regional cooperation.
The seventh and final panel at this year’s plenum was dedicated to civic values in the region. The speakers on the panel were Andro Martinović from the Montenegrin Academy of Sciences and Arts (CANU), Dr. Hrvoje Klasić from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb, Sofija Mandić from the Center for Judicial Research (CEPRIS) in Serbia, and Dr. Nerzuk Ćurak, a professor at the Faculty of Political Sciences at the University of Sarajevo. The moderator was Prof. Dr. Sabina Bakić from the Faculty of Political Sciences at the University of Sarajevo.
Sofija Mandić stated that the Western Balkans need to learn to balance the fact that Europe is a peace project and that it is currently at war. She said that, at least in the case of Serbia, it is not fully committed to European values, especially regarding the concept of peace. She assessed that Serbia is in both an electoral and a constitutional crisis, which is a significant value defeat for a country that has had free elections for the past 30 years. Mandić added that this crisis has exposed that the authoritarian regime no longer has majority support, but cannot be defeated in elections. She noted that the question arises as to how to continue and concluded that there are islands in society that resist this, including free media, albeit reduced to a minimum, and civil society within the academic community and the NGO sector. She concluded that civil society and civic values in Serbia are in a state of hibernation and cannot be carriers of significant changes in society, but despite this, public opinion surveys show that the situation in Serbia is surprisingly positive regarding citizens’ attitudes, such as EU accession or the views of young people. She added that there is a significant gap between what is seen in the media and the official narrative and what citizens intimately think and feel.
Andro Martinović said that things should be viewed in multiple dimensions and recalled the words of a writer who described the road to Bosnia as a journey through different times, concluding that the most significant questions for us are actually about what happened. He stated that Serbia continuously deals with the past, but in a very specific way, interpreting these events in a way that presents it in the best possible light, preventing confrontation with the truth. He concluded by saying that a citizen is someone who thinks critically about the world around them, and we first need to build that kind of citizen.
Hrvoje Klasić recalled the situation from 1993 and the war crime that occurred in Štrpci, where a group of soldiers pulled out a group of people while most of the passengers silently watched, but one person decided to react and show what civic values – solidarity, responsibility, tolerance, and civic courage – are. He paid for this with his life. Klasić said the reason he told this story is that he tries to imagine that train in 2024 and answer whether we can imagine someone being harassed for being of a different nationality and how many would be onlookers versus those who would show civic courage and oppose it, questioning how much we have progressed from what we had 30 years ago. He emphasized that when we talk about civic values, we always speak of parallel realities and the question arises of what civic values are today, what is mainstream today. He concluded that the most imperfect EU is better than the alternative. He said that when we look back at the past, we see that we did have civic values, the partisan movement, the former Yugoslavia, a time of solidarity, and that there is no need to look elsewhere but to look at how we behaved in the past. He concluded that Croatia has made many positive changes since joining the EU, but there is still much work ahead. Despite these shortcomings, he said he does not think about whether elections were rigged, knowing that if a scandal is uncovered, even the president or prime minister might end up in prison, and he does not feel that the state is deceiving or robbing him.
Nerzuk Ćurak said that finding a citizen in the absolute sense of the term is almost impossible because being a citizen means being radically independent, which is impossible in our societies that demand pure and one-dimensional identities incompatible with the concept of citizenship. He said that Bosnia and Herzegovina is now in a phase of attempting to emancipate political citizenship in a way that produces misunderstandings and fears, and there is a radical rejection by Serbian and Croatian nationalism to see themselves in the idea of citizenship. In the real-political field, this produces many misunderstandings and leads to the dehumanization of Bosnian society. He said that, in this sense, the anti-fascist movement must become the starting point for building a civic society because it is the idea of unity among Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats. He added that it is necessary to work on elementary small things to build a citizen. He stated that Bosnia and Herzegovina, despite all the horrors, violence, and aggression that have occurred, has retained elements of essential unity.