
Christian Eccher
Serbia is a country of contradictions: it is very close to the European Union, in fact almost in the center of Europe, but at the same time it is very far from it. Serbian labor migrants have always chosen Western Europe as a destination for emigration, but the heart of the nation beats in the east, with a cultural and sentimental link to Russia, even though no one really thinks that Russia is a country to live in at all. In Serbia, joining the European Union is more a matter of national and social prestige – joining a club of rich and well-ordered countries – than a necessity; on the contrary, many of the rules laid down by the EU are seen as an obstacle and a hindrance to EU candidates. It has to be said that Brussels, especially in recent years, has not done very much for its popularity in Serbia. The EU is not only Serbia’s number one trading partner, but also its biggest donor, with €4 billion since 2000[1], compared to €31.4 million for China in second place. As far as Russia is concerned, there are no real data on the subject, but Moscow is not even in the top ten largest donors. Nevertheless, ordinary Serbians believe that it is Russia that helps Serbia the most, including financially. The reason for this misconception is not only the bad publicity that the EU gives itself and its activities, but above all the propaganda of the state authorities. In addition, the population is suspicious of the EU because of its neoliberal policies, which are synonymous with the sale of state-owned enterprises to private individuals and the exploitation of labor: companies from the West come to Serbia, open their factories and exploit the workers as much as they like; then they close down, and it is up to the state to take care for the unemployed. Therefore, one of the landmarks of Serbian policy is, of course, President Lukashenko of Belarus, who has refused to sell state-owned companies to foreign multinationals but has kept many of them in state ownership. However, there is another, purely Serbian, contradiction: the ruling political class, led by President Aleksandar Vučić, promotes a deeply neoliberal domestic policy, but at the same time manages to present itself to the public as a very responsible political class, which is striving to preserve the Serbian nation and to take care of the public. Vučić is a kind of Lukashenko, but one who does not defend national assets and sells everything he can. For example, he is prepared to sell the whole of central Serbia to the multinational Rio Tinto for lithium extraction (there are mass protests about this these days, more on that later). In order to understand why this is happening and the reasons for all these contradictions, we need to look at the political and social mechanisms that have governed Serbian society from 2012 to the present day.
A PROBLEM OF POLITICAL CULTURE (AND NOT ONLY THIS)
Aleksandar Vučić’s party has been in power since 2012 – 12 long years in which the President (although he has not managed to create a real cult of personality as in some other countries – I think of Nursultan Nazarbayev’s Kazakhstan or Ilham Aliyev’s Azerbaijan) has built up an extraordinarily strong and very stable political system. Vučić became the absolute master of Serbia at a time when the West (above all the US and Angela Merkel’s Germany) decided that it was time to end the reign of the incumbent, Boris Tadić, who was guilty of failing to resolve the Kosovo issue and who did not have the strong support of the electorate. At that time, the only real alternative was the Radical Party of the war criminal Vojislav Šešelj; thanks to the political work of Western diplomats, Tomislav Nikolić and Aleksandar Vučić left the Radicals and founded the SNS (Serbian Progress Party), on the basis of which they won the 2012 presidential elections. Nikolić became President, but behind him Vučić ruled, promising the West that he would solve the Kosovo is[2]sue for the last time, following the logic that “only the one who created the problem can solve it”. Vučić formally became President of Serbia in 2017, but de facto he has been the most powerful man in Serbian politics since 2012. Under Slobodan Milošević, Vučić was Minister of Information and one of the architects of the ethno-nationalist propaganda of those years. Years of balancing between the West and the demands of Russia and China followed, before a reconciliation agreement was finally reached in the form of the agreement signed in Brussels with the Kosovo Albanian representatives[3]. During these years of rule, Vučić grew stronger and stronger until he became the absolute master of Serbia. This was made possible by the SNS party machine, a party with a strong pyramidal hierarchical structure with himself, Aleksandar Vučić, at the top: every post in the civil service is reserved for those who bring additional votes to the coalition government (which also includes the socialists of Ivica Dačić, the longest-serving politician ever in the countries of former Yugoslavia).
Every state institution, from hospitals to universities, is strictly controlled by the party and follows the iron logic of absolutism: the heads of companies are appointed by the SNS leadership (i.e. Vučić and a few of his colleagues) and can act as absolute rulers in the institution they control (as long as it does not contradict their boss Vučić). In fact, they are little Vučićs themselves; the opposition parties are left with crumbs, such as the humanities faculties, but nothing fundamentally changes: these leaders also adopt the logic of absolute rule and are no different from Vučić and ‘his people’ (the faculty where I work has had the same dean for 18 years; I have not seen this anywhere, not in Central Asian countries, not in Russia, not in Belarus). Intellectuals and university professors are silent and, following a corporatist logic similar to that promoted by Mussolini in Italy in the 1930s, they participate in the system of government and receive money from the state through research projects and state funding, as long as they do not interfere with the government. Meanwhile, whoever obstructs the government must leave, the blackening machine casts its ominous shadow over them; most ‘dissidents’ – even those who simply refuse to take part in this system of government – quietly emigrate abroad, to the West. This leads to the sad conclusion that the problem is not Vučić himself, but the political culture, which has its roots in the Communist era, and in the 1990s in particular, with a supreme leader who decides the affairs of the whole country. However, politicians such as Milošević and Vučić, even taken together, have never had the political depth, rationality, and charisma of Tito alone.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Meanwhile, the ruling class has been enormously enriched by corruption and deals with Western and Eastern partners, such as the concession of Belgrade airport to the French company Vinci, the construction of the elite Belgrade-on-the-Water (Beograd na vodi) neighbourhood by the company from the United Arab Emirates, and the Belgrade-Budapest high-speed rail contract with Chinese and Russian companies. These are just a few of the deals made with foreign businessmen, followed by a series of scams; moreover, contracts with foreign companies are often state secrets, so it is not known what Serbia’s foreign debt really is. One example is the Fiat car industry group, which received impressive state funding to relocate one of its factories to the Serbian city of Kragujevac. For this reason, the West (especially the EU) has criticised Vučić and called him an autocrat, but at least for the time being it has no intention of withdrawing its political support. Business is paramount. Comparing Vučić’s balancing policy with Yugoslavia, the leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, is completely wrong: Vučić is not balancing, he is simply doing business with everyone and selling out his country as much as possible. Why is the President still enjoying the sympathy of the majority of the Serbian population? Institutional control and clientelism are key, but even more important is the role of the media.
MEDIA
The media, in particular the two private TV channels “Pink” and “Happy”, ensure voter support for the ruling party and President Vučić. Journalist and political analyst Boris Varga points out that in Serbia, the role of the state-owned RTS has never been crucial in achieving and reproducing consensus[4]. The model of private television as the main engine of propaganda has been promoted as far back as Milošević, as it avoids criticism from the opposition and international organisations.
State television does remain relatively free, and this does not hinder the ruling class, as the population mainly follows other broadcasters, which attract the masses thanks to the widespread use of paraphernalia such as reality shows. The main private TV channels are Pink, owned by the tycoon Željko Mitrović (who is a musician, industrialist, drone maker, inventor, and cocaine addict to boot), and Happy, originally a children’s TV channel, which has illegitimately turned into a very powerful political propaganda tool. The director of Happy is the journalist Milomir Marić, and its regular guest and commentator is the war criminal and MP Vojislav Šešelj. The government team uses Happy and Pink to disseminate its monologues, and from the two broadcasters’ Belgrade studios Vučić regularly attacks the small opposition media and discredits political opponents. Happy and Pink are the most watched TV stations in towns and villages, but in addition to them there are dozens of private broadcasters controlled by the state-owned telecoms company Telekom Srbija, which is gradually expanding its control over the airwaves.
The differences between urban and rural Serbia are dramatic, both economically and culturally. These televisions penetrate where poverty, i.e. the lack of knowledge, prevails. 6.9% of the Serbian population live in absolute poverty, 29.8% in a situation defined as severe and on the verge of poverty, at risk of social exclusion (i.e. these people are barely making ends meet). These are very high figures, especially considering that the average wage (February 2023) in Serbia is only around €600 per month and inflation is 16%. Serbia is one of the poorest countries in Europe and its population spends almost everything it earns on food. A real middle class exists only in Novi Sad and Belgrade. The opposition has two television channels, N1 and Nova S, owned by the American group United Media, which are only broadcast via the SBB Internet platform: this means that the majority of the population does not have access to these channels.
LINKS TO CRIMINALS
Vučić has close links with criminal groups. On the night of 24-25 April 2016, a group of masked men with bulldozers and sledgehammers illegally demolished Belgrade’s Savamala neighbourhood, where “Belgrade on Water”, the capital’s new elite neighbourhood on the Sava River, was to be built. The masked demolitionists were members of the [Belgrade football club] Crvena zvezda fan group, which has long been associated with the Vučić brothers, Aleksandar – the current President – and Andrej.
At a press conference at the end of April 2023, Aleksandar Vučić finally admitted that he had been the initiator of the demolition campaign (in which the caretaker of one of the buildings was killed), and that he had made only one mistake: he had entrusted such a delicate task to ‘idiots’ instead of personally climbing on top of the bulldozer. The links with the supporters go back to the 1990s and are not limited to Crvena zvezda: supporters of another Belgrade club, Partizan, led by Veljko Belivuk, enforced law and order in front of the Skupština (parliament) during the 2017 inauguration ceremony of Vučić, when opposition protests were feared. Belivuk himself, who had become too influential due to his enormous political clout, or perhaps his own mistakes, was arrested in a spectacular police action in 2021. The then Minister of the Interior, Aleksandar Vulin, now head of the secret services and a man known as Moscow’s confidant, showed vivid and graphic photographs of the corpses of the victims tortured and murdered by Mr Belivuk on the Pink television channel; during his interrogation on the previous day, he repeatedly claimed that he had worked for Mr Vučić. The President has denied this, but there are photographs of Vučić’s son, Danilo, in the company of Vidojević, a confidant of Belivuk. In the north of Kosovo and Metohija, Vučić also controls the population thanks to the criminal Zvonko Veselinović, who is closely linked to the President’s family. In Vojvodina, a marijuana plantation was discovered in the company Jovanjica, which was supposed to produce organic food. During the arrest, the owner of the farm called the President’s brother, Andrej Vučić, who is allegedly involved not only in the cultivation of the drug but also in the sale of cannabis on Western markets.
VOJVODINA
Vojvodina is a multi-ethnic region of Serbia, with as many as 28 nationalities, many languages and many cultures. The [JSFR] constitution of 1974 granted the province autonomy during the Yugoslav era. In the 1990s, Slobodan Milošević abolished the autonomy, and it was only in 2001 that the so-called “Omnibus Law” was adopted, which restored the autonomy of Vojvodina, but only on paper. Serbia is still a highly centralised country, with all decisions being taken exclusively in Belgrade.
The journalist Mihal Ramac reminded us in the pages of the newspaper Danas that the Democrats in power in Belgrade between 2004 and 2012 “changed the members and directors of the administrative boards according to their own tastes, recommending incompetent people who were suited to the party’s logical purpose of laundering dirty money by building village canals and city boulevards”. In short, when the DS [Demokratska stranka – Democratic Party] ruled at national level, ‘the republican government protected the regional government, and the regional government protected the republican government’. For many years, Ramac recalls, there was a non-aggression pact between the democrats and the radicals, who mostly followed Nikolić and joined the Progress Party. Although the Democrats were aware of the crimes of the radicals, especially during the Milošević regime, they allowed the main perpetrators to go free and, in some cases, even protected them. Vučić took advantage of his great popularity, which he still enjoys today, to break this pact and destroy the last Democratic stronghold, the autonomous government of Vojvodina. The result is that, although Vojvodina is the richest region in Serbia, it is essentially dying from any angle. Local Hungarians, especially young Hungarians, are going to Hungary to study and work. The local Romanians have almost disappeared from Banat [the Romanian name for the region], and other nationalities live on their own land but play no role at the political and institutional level in the Republic of Serbia[5].
According to the historian Boris Mašić, the process of “Saintsavization” [referring to Saint Sava, the patron saint of the Serbian Orthodox, whose cult is an important part of the idea of a Greater Serbia] and the process of “Serbianisation” is now underway in Vojvodina. The regional capital, Novi Sad, is experiencing an unprecedented ‘urbicide’: construction is taking place wherever possible, even where it should not be, and environmentalists’ protests are being suppressed with violence (as in the case of the Šodroš embankment on the Danube, where a bridge is being built with a housing estate, against the advice of experts who predict that the area will be subjected to severe flooding in future). However, it is not all black and there are good things: for example, the regional Radio Television Vojvodina (RT Vojvodina) maintains a multilingual structure and many other broadcasters (e.g. Slovenia’s regional RTV Koper) often visit RT Vojvodina’s headquarters in order to learn from it how to create multilingual television.
AND WHAT ABOUT OPPOSITION?
Will the opposition be able to build on the success of the month-long demonstrations and create a political alternative to Vučić? It is unlikely that this will happen. In fact, there is a lack of a personality of high ethical value who could unite the parties opposed to Vučić, which are deeply divided amongst themselves. On the right are Boško Obradović and his movements Dveri (Doors) and Zavetniki (Confessors), which advocate a nationalist policy worthy of the Italian Fascist Party of the early 1930s. On the left are ecological movements and civil organisations (Ne davimo Beograd (Let’s not give up Belgrade), Moramo – zajedno (We can – together), Ekološki ustanak (Ecological Uprising), Pokret slobodnih građana (Free Citizens’ Union)), which do not find a common language and are not united by a political platform.
All these parties and movements have completely different political programmes, but they share one common element: the complete inability to formulate a discourse on Serbia’s reconciliation with the 1990s (I am not talking about guilt here, all the former Yugoslav countries take part of the blame, but simply about the past: there was a war 30 years ago, let this war become history! The next generations will decide who is responsible for what happened. Serbia has past traumas that need to be analysed through a kind of mass psychoanalysis, as the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek famously observed. Victim politics (‘The West hates us, the East is not helping us enough’, ‘Yes, we killed the Croats, but let us not forget what they have done to us throughout history’ – phrases that we hear every day on television, in squares, in cafes and on the streets of Serbia) and nationalism have brought the country to an impasse that has made it impossible to resolve major issues such as relations with Kosovo (de jure and de facto independent) and rapprochement with the European Union, which now seems chimerical. The politicians capable of taking the helm of power and dealing with these issues simply do not exist. Over the last 30 years, young people who would like to continue this discourse have been excluded from public life and many have emigrated abroad.
The opposition hopes that the West will find an alternative to Vučić, and this could happen in the future, but there is a danger that the new President, whoever he may be, will represent the interests of foreigners in the country rather than the Serbian people. The state, then, is Vučić himself, the only politician with concrete experience of governance. This was demonstrated by the recent visit of German Chancellor Scholz to Belgrade at the end of June 2024: Scholz arrived unexpectedly in Serbia to persuade Vučić to open lithium mines in the middle of Serbia, in an area that (used to be) a nature reserve. Three years ago, Serbs were already protesting against the opening of these mines by the multinational Rio Tinto. Although the President promised that the mines would not be opened, pressure from the West forced Vučić to change his mind. The population is protesting again, and the pro-European opposition feels ridiculed and deprived of Brussels’ support in its fight against the Vučić autocracy. At the same time, the population is gradually losing confidence in the European integration project. It is naive to expect the EU to solve Serbia’s problems. Serbia has and must solve its own problems. Let a new, responsible elite take the helm of political life and let there be a public debate on whether the country should be in the EU or not. The problem is that, as we can see, such a political class simply does not exist.
KOSOVO
Meanwhile, the Kremlin continues to exploit the situation to create instability in the Balkans. The Russian Ambassador in Belgrade, Alexander Bochan-Harchenko, regularly makes statements to the pro-government Serbian press and accuses the West of organising clashes and demonstrations in Kosovo and Metohija at the same time, in order to provoke a real “Serbian Spring”.
This is a clear signal to Vucic: Russia is on your side, and if you are on our side too, we will defend you. In order to further balance between East and West, Vučić is returning to the old and effective map of nationalism and Kosovo. Whenever there are institutional problems, the Serbian President causes a series of protests in Kosovska Mitrovica. Then new problems are created, new tensions are artificially diffused. However, playing with fire always carries risks: a resurgence of nationalist extremism in the region cannot be ruled out; violence could break out in Kosovo and Metohija and then spill over Serbia’s borders and cause an explosion in Bosnia and Herzegovina, an ethnically divided and institutionally dysfunctional country. So far, Vučić has managed to position himself as the guarantor of the Dayton Agreement and of the integrity of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, but there is nothing to say that one day he will no longer be able to take control of the situation and to quell the violence. The Kremlin is just waiting for such an opportunity to finally infiltrate the Balkans and cause chaos in Europe. Vučić is a political chameleon worthy of the role of Machiavellian ruler. However, if, according to Machiavelli, a ruler must rule for the people, according to Vucic, the people must serve him and unconditionally support the ruling class. Even at the cost of death on the Bosnian hills or on the Croatian Slavonian plain.
After the fall of communism, many Serbs returned to Orthodoxy. In fact, religion is what separates the Serbs from the Croats and Bosnian Muslims. The Church plays a primarily political role, and the current Patriarch, Porfirio, openly supports Vučić. In addition, the Orthodox Church is a major Russian front, especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Russian spies on the territory of the Republika Srpska are linked to the Church and are therefore difficult to monitor and trace (often priests). In terms of spirituality, Serbia is no different from any other country in the West or the East: religion has a socio-political identification function, but the population is largely pagan: people are concerned with material wealth – wealth, money and social success.
SERBIAN SOCIETY
So far, we have analysed the institutional mechanisms that dominate Serbian political life. However, in order to better understand this complex and very interesting country, we need to focus on the people, on their daily lives. There is a huge gap between Serbs living in cities and Serbs living in small towns and rural areas. In the cities, Serbian society is rather schizophrenic: it seeks a Western, neoliberal model of life, focused on the search for personal wealth, while at the same time wanting to uphold the traditional nationalist values of the 19th century. In this respect, Serbian society is identical in every respect to Russian society: selfish and greedy for wealth, but ready to send young (poor) people to war to defend Russia’s national values in the Donbas and to punish Ukraine. Meanwhile, poverty and total ignorance reign in the Serbian countryside. To give you an idea of the situation, here are some figures: in a country of just under 5 million inhabitants, there are around 700 000 people without teeth[6]. Out of necessity, not opportunism, these people understand politics as a contract with the currently dominant classes: I give you a vote, you give me a job; you can steal and get rich, but you can provide me with my daily bread, coffee and cigarettes. The political parties in opposition cannot and do not know how to talk to these people: they mock them, but they do not understand that they are dealing with people who are barely making ends meet. These people are demanding concrete answers, not promises of institutional reforms, EU accession and so on. Just words about democracy are not enough for anyone. Vučić, meanwhile, often addresses the people, goes to the villages (just like Lukashenko in Belarus) and promises to solve their everyday problems (and often does so). You do not explain to people who are barely getting by that sewage or road problems are for the competent authorities to solve. What matters to them is that the problems are solved as soon as possible. That is why they vote for Vučić, because there is always the hope that he will appear in person in their villages and help them to solve specific problems.
INTELLECTUALS
Intellectuals, especially writers, are another major obstacle to change in Serbia. Most of them are still living in the 19th century and are looking for a significant role in society; they would like writers and poets to play an active role in the political sphere: they would still like to be the ones who create ideologies for people. Their example is Dobrica Ćosić, who was a writer and Prime Minister under Milošević. It is clear that he did not achieve anything concrete but was merely used by Milošević for his own purposes. Even opposition intellectuals would like to return to their old role as ideologues: a poet friend of mine (from the opposition) recently confessed to me that he was nostalgic for the time when poets were valued and took part in political decision-making. The role of the political intellectual is now obsolete, and we should not be nostalgic for those times. As the Italian poet Franco Fortini wrote, poetry has always been a servant’s wine in the service of the ruling class[7]. It was only during the Baroque period and in the 20th century that European intellectuals began to feel closer to the people, to feel part of them, and not to see themselves as superior to them. This still has not happened in Serbia, as is evident from the numerous literary competitions and prizes, almost all of which are state-funded. Serbian intellectuals love their nation very much, but not the people who make it up, because they do not know them and do not want to know them. s an ideal nation that serves national and nationalist chimeras. One very famous writer told me frankly that his role is to use his novels to motivate people to go to Kosovo and to go to war, while he sits in his study and writes for them.
SERBIA IS NOT A COUNTRY FOR YOUNG PEOPLE
Young people live in a bubble. Completely disconnected from the world around them, they rarely develop a critical awareness of themselves. They are passive and feel unaccepted. Humanities graduates work mainly in the service centres of Western companies, answering calls from rich Westerners when they have problems with an online order or a refrigerator they have just bought. They seem to be satisfied with low salaries, it’s about survival. The entertainment industry provides cheap entertainment, from a week-long seaside holiday to drugs that make you forget reality. According to one study, 40% of young people under 30 use hard drugs regularly, 40% occasionally and only 20% do not use drugs[8]. For them, an alternative to the current political and social system is not even imaginable. They are completely anaesthetised and accustomed to corruption and injustice, phenomena they have known since childhood. The first generation, who knew neither the Austro-Hungarian Empire nor Yugoslavia, and who grew up in the Republic of Serbia, have already entered universities throughout the country. However, the causes of the youth crisis need to be found elsewhere, not in Yugoslavia or Vienna. What does this stagnation really mean in a country where, until very recently, very young people opposed Milošević and his dictatorship? The greatest responsibility lies with the school system, which is completely devastated. One police officer, who wishes to remain anonymous, confessed to me that over the last 20 years the police have started to monitor the diplomas obtained by students at public universities: more than 40% of them are bought or obtained with bribes. “We are so desperate that we don’t know what to do”. The entire country’s police force would not be enough to bring order to the country’s universities and to distinguish genuine diplomas from fake ones,” says a police official. There are exceptions, such as the Department of Physics at the Faculty of Natural and Technical Sciences, famous for its research on particle physics, but these are exceptions that prove the rule.
Primary education is even worse than secondary education: Serbia has been at the bottom of the PISA (the OECD’s programme for assessing the literacy level of 15-year-olds) rankings for many years. More than half of Serbian citizens are functionally illiterate, i.e. they cannot read and understand a text of moderate complexity, such as a newspaper article. The opposition does not know how to talk to this part of the population, which is easy prey for the nationalist and populist statements of Mr Vučić and his allies.
In this way, a huge class divide is reproduced. Young people from good families, who are also tired and unmotivated, are leaving their homes en masse and going elsewhere, mainly to the West, where they can continue their education, find work and a satisfactory social role. After all, Austria is less than 500 km from Belgrade. The poorest stay and survive as best they can on the basis of the values and models provided by the dominant classes. These are, again, the nationalist models of the 1990s: it is true that, since then, Serbian society has been subjected to constant convulsions, violence and verbal intolerance, which seem to be inspired by more than just the younger generation. The nationalist rhetoric of the former dictator Slobodan Milošević is still heard at all levels of public discourse. Ceca Ražnatović, the most famous pop singer, music diva and all-round television guest, is the widow of Željko Ražnatović, nicknamed Arkan, the leader of the notorious paramilitary militia, the ‘Arkan Tigers’, who was responsible for kidnappings, murders and various acts of violence in Bosnia and Croatia during the early 1990s. In 1994, he was assassinated by members of another rival clan.
Tickets for concerts by Baja Mali Knindža, a composer of turbo-folk music (a genre that combines Turkish melodies with rock and pop rhythms), which was very popular in the 1990s, are still sold out, despite the songs glorifying hatred of Muslims and love of guns, sex and drugs (Ne volim te, Alija, / zato što si balija! / Srušio si miran san! / Nosila ti Drina / sto mudžahedina / svaki dan! “I don’t love you, Aliya, / because you are a coward! / You’ve interrupted a peaceful dream! / Drina carried you / a hundred mujahedeen / every day!) The nationalist ideologies inherited from the 1990s are complemented by the typical values of neoliberalism, which the country has embraced with open arms since the end of the last Balkan wars: competition, disdain for the weakest, enrichment at any cost. These two models, although seemingly opposed to each other, are in fact coherent. Serbian youth live in a kind of schizophrenic bubble, where the defence and glorification of national superiority meet and merge with the pursuit of wealth and success at social level. The country’s absolute master, Mr Vučić, has managed to reconcile these contradictions, because he is in complete control of the country’s public life.
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Christian Eccher (born 1977 in Basel) is a Serbian-Italian journalist, essayist, writer, reporter and academic researcher.Since 2007 he has been living in Serbia, working as Assistant Professor of Italian Language and Literature at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad. He holds a PhD from La Sapienza University of Rome. His journalistic work focuses on countries where cultures meet and sometimes nations clash. He is the author of numerous essays, publications and books. He writes and publishes in Serbian and Italian.
Christian Eccher is the first Serbian guest in the event’s history to participate in the 7th Nida Forum, which this year is focused on the theme “Fractures of European Identity”. This text is the subject of his appearance at the forum
The Nida Forum takes place on 6-7 September in Nida, Lithuania, at the Curonian Spit History Museum.
The Forum is organised by the Thomas Mann Cultural Centre.
[1] https://balkans.aljazeera.net/opinions/2024/4/24/srbija-zivi-od-eu-a-kune-se-u-kinu-i-rusiju
[2] https://www.slobodnaevropa.org/a/most-na-cemu-se-zasniva-vuciceva-moc/25045386.html
[3] https://www.slobodnaevropa.org/a/most-na-cemu-se-zasniva-vuciceva-moc/25045386.html
[4] https://issuu.com/zavodzakulturuvojvodine/docs/interkulturalnost_11
[5] Marelj, Živan S., “Ukidanje autonomnosti Vojvodine – Početak razbijanja Jugoslavije”, Dan Graf, Beograd, 2020.
[6] https://www.blic.rs/vesti/drustvo/u-srbiji-700000-ljudi-nema-nijedan-zub-da-li-ce-stomatoloske-usluge-biti-besplatne/3pm2t76
[7] https://apps.uniroma3.it/ateneo/memo/files/pub_Locandina_8c16a7a5-713a-4432-b16e-8c82f016d095.pdf
[8] https://koms.rs/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Alternativni_izvestaj_2024.pdf