“The Republic of Serbia will maintain its principled position of not introducing restrictive measures against the Russian Federation.”
Well, there you have it: Serbia under Vučić, contrary to everything I believe, has had at least one principled position. Yes, those aren’t my words. The students say so. How did Vučić suddenly earn this acknowledgment from them? He asked for it himself. And the students gave him – unintentionally, I believe – this recognition of his “principled stance.” Vučić asked: Will you impose sanctions on Russia? The students replied: We will do the same as you – we will not. And there we have a sudden flicker of harmony and togetherness. A united Serbia, one might say.
What was it that, if only for a moment, brought Vučić and the students closer together? According to the students, it was “our own historical experience.” Not merely “experience,” then, but specifically “historical” experience. Why “historical”? Because it is not, and cannot be, the students’ own experience. Most students were not even born when Serbia was under sanctions, so this cannot be something they personally lived through or experienced. Yet they insist that it is their experience, and so they have to add the word “historical.” But really, what they mean by “historical” is – “collective.”
And so the students, too, continue this chain of collective experience, at the heart of which lies an understanding, and self-understanding, of one’s “own” collective exclusively as a victim. Yes, we did not live through it, we have no personal experience of it, but we take your word for it: the sanctions were undeserved, they changed nothing, and only ordinary people suffered. And since that is so, we will not impose sanctions on anyone else either, including Russia. Fine. Let it be so.
A question for the students: if one state commits violence against another state, what means do we have at our disposal, short of declaring war, to stop it?
I know, I know, I’m not Vučić, so the students are hardly going to rush to answer me. And it does not really matter. Something else interests me here: precisely this chain of historical lessons drawn from “collective” experience. Something happened, that something was bad, and therefore we will never repeat it or participate in it again. That is how I understood the students’ “principled” position on sanctions, and Vučić’s as well, as we have seen before. Let us assume that the students (and Vučić) are right. Let us assume that sanctions change nothing and merely cause harm.
After all, readers of my generation will remember the sanctions well, we have all experienced them. Exceptionally intelligent people spoke and wrote against the sanctions, people who were not only far removed from Milošević’s politics (and therefore from Vučić’s Radical Party politics as well), but who also publicly and fiercely opposed them. Their argument was similar to that of the students: sanctions do not threaten the architects of aggressive policies and military plans. They hurt ordinary people who, by the nature of things, cannot be held responsible for war.
And not only that. Many ordinary people may not support their political leaders’ war effort at all, but under sanctions, feeling themselves subjected to injustice from abroad, they may close ranks in solidarity with their criminal leadership. And that is indeed what happened in Serbia back in the 1990s. But sanctions do not necessarily always carry the noble intention of converting or re-educating anyone by imposing material deprivation. Their purpose can be simpler: to weaken an aggressor economically so that it is no longer capable of waging war.
In addition, sanctions can carry another message, one addressed not only to the regime and its subjects. In other words, they do not necessarily have to be aimed at weakening the regime and awakening its subjects to reality. The message can simply be this: what you are doing, what is happening because of you, is something we simply cannot accept. Sanctions would then (also) constitute a moral condemnation of evil. It follows that, in the case of Serbia today, the decision not to join sanctions against Russia – or, for that matter, the fact that we are not even considering sanctions against Israel – means that “we” (and everyone can put whatever they wish into that “we”) refuse to recognise evil as evil (in this case, the Russian aggression against Ukraine).
I don’t claim that sanctions have proved effective, far from it. Leaving aside what happened back then, let us look at our own time: Serbia is still living with the consequences of the profound criminalization that occurred under the sanctions of the 1990s. Crime became the only response to the existential threat, both for the regime at the time and for ordinary people living in Serbia. So I do not think sanctions are wonderful either. But again: what other means are available to thwart or constrain an aggressive state in its destructive undertakings and attacks on its neighbours?
Let us leave that question unresolved, then, and return to drawing lessons from experience and behaving accordingly. Are sanctions the only thing that remains in our “collective” experience of the 1990s? In a sense, alongside the bombing, they are, if we preserve as legitimate “collective” experience only the memory of those situations in which the “collective” was clearly the victim. But what about other situations, those in which that same “collective” was not the victim but was, for example, the aggressor?
Can we draw lessons from those situations as well? Fine, we should question the fairness and effectiveness of sanctions. But should we not also remember, at least occasionally, why sanctions were imposed in the first place on what was then still called Yugoslavia, but was in reality already Serbia? And should we not draw conclusions from that memory as well? Conclusions according to which we could, or perhaps should, behave? The same analogy should be applied to the 1999 bombing.
Yet in the “collective” memory to which the students now also “principledly” appeal, the sanctions and the bombing appear as a kind of Year Zero. Through the sheer scale of the damage inflicted on the “collective,” they erase everything that happened before them. This is the famous phrase: “unprovoked by anything.” When that phrase began spreading through public discourse, it sounded so idiotic as to be unbearable. But look at it now: it seems to have stood the test of time. The phrase has succeeded in “principledly” erasing everything that preceded the sanctions and the bombing.
So the students and Vučić do not merely share a “principled” position on sanctions against anyone. In fact, they don’t share that at all. What they actually share is a tendency toward selective memory and toward drawing far-reaching conclusions from that selective memory. For Vučić, this is inexcusable. For the students, it is entirely understandable and should not be held against them. They are the children of the Serbia of the 1990s. That is the Serbia which shaped them – a Serbia excessively prone to selective memory and to insisting on seeing itself as the victim of a colossal global injustice.
And there is little that can be done about that overnight. All we can do is marvel at how courageously those children stood up and confronted an arrogant, heartless regime with an excessive propensity for violence. Now that they have risen up, all we can do is stand beside them and try to protect them from excessive repression. But that is not, or not only, what this is about now. We have elections ahead of us. And in those elections, there is one, and only one, important shared objective: to free ourselves from the regime headed by Vučić.
To achieve that, we need general mobilization. And that means not a single vote against the regime can be allowed to stay home. That is why it is important that, alongside the students, we have two other electoral blocs to pick up the votes the students fail to reach. The campaign must focus solely on this: these are elections against a criminal regime, and the only thing on the electoral table is liberation. If all of that is true, why engage with Vučić at all? Why answer his insidious questions?
By now it is crystal clear to everyone that the aim of the regime’s campaign is to ensure that as many people as possible, preferably exclusively opponents of the regime, stay home on election day and do not vote. Vučić does not ask questions out of curiosity, or because he wants to compete over programmes, values and “principles.” He asks them in order to divide people and set them against one another. Because the question of sanctions against Russia is also a question about the EU. Whether Serbia will or will not impose sanctions on Russia is effectively the same question as whether Serbia will or will not join the EU.
And as in any normal, decent society, we who live in Serbia are divided over these questions, because as reasonable people we do not all think alike. The problem is that Serbia is neither normal nor decent – although we, the members of this society in revolt, meaning both the students and the opposition, are – and these are not elections intended to determine who thinks what about the EU or sanctions against Russia. These are elections – and I have no difficulty repeating this a thousand times – for liberation. These are elections in which we should fight for the chance to create a normal and decent Serbia.
There is a well-known rallying cry of militant democracy: no democracy for the enemies of democracy. Something similar should apply to Vučić during this campaign: no polite conversation with an enemy of all conversation and all decency.
Translated by Marijana Simić
Peščanik.net, 05.10.2026.
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Latest posts by Dejan Ilić (see all)
- “The Collective” and its “experience” - 05/10/2026
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