By: Agon Maliqi
When the next EU Commission starts its mandate in 2030, the Western Balkans will be marking the 40th anniversary of the fall of communism and the dissolution of Yugoslavia. It just so happens that the median age of the region’s population is also 40.
By 2030, the average Western Balkans citizen will have lived their entire life in the “transition era.” This was supposed to be a temporary phase of transformation from one political order into another – from communist command economies managing ethnic and political diversity with a strong hand, toward rights-based liberal democracies and free markets “pooling” their sovereignty in Brussels.
Yet by the mid-2030s – when our countries hope to join the EU in some form – “the transition period” will have lasted almost as long as the communist era.
An entire generation has grown up watching other Central and Eastern European countries achieve this transformation with varying degrees of success, while remaining stuck in political limbo themselves. Living standards have improved, but considerably less than in EU neighbors, all the while experiencing deteriorating democratic standards and a fresh wave of nationalism.
The political and economic transition was never supposed to be easy. But it was never supposed to feel so permanent, directionless, and disorienting.
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; in this interregnum a great many morbid symptoms appear” – so wrote Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci as he observed the turmoil of the 1930s. We have seen these morbid symptoms of transition – wars and corrupt governance – derail our path toward Europe and eventually intersect with the West’s own crisis of confidence. When the EU put enlargement on hold, our interregnum became indefinite. The new world: stillborn.
The goal we were transitioning toward – “the end of history” – lost its original appeal along the way, making us feel as though we had already missed the party. Fukuyama correctly predicted that “an end of history” run by technocratic politics would feel sterile and boring, and that revisionist forces would reignite ideological conflict to feel a sense of purpose. Watching the EU become more like the Balkans over the last decade has only deepened our disorientation.
Elections in the Western Balkans occasionally did produce positive change, but also disillusionment. Newly elected governments regressed to the mean – governance based on patronage, oligarchic control, and nationalist populism – unable to resolve structural security and governance problems or meet the EU’s constantly shifting benchmarks.
The accumulation of anger and frustration has also produced impressive anti-establishment social movements against illiberal governance, most recently in Serbia and Albania. The challenge is that while these movements know who and what they are against, they can’t consolidate a clear vision for the future as no ideological project has sufficient inspirational force. Reactionary nationalist and religious projects have regained ground, but they either contradict one another or carry memories of their ills too fresh to ignore.
This collective state of neither moving clearly toward a certain future nor daring to fully embrace troubled pasts has created a paradox where the values of both future and past coexist. Montenegro, for example, can be simultaneously knocking on the EU’s door while having a parliamentary leader who glorifies genocide. Talk about a glitch in the Matrix where both the old and new world coexist.
The mental toll of 40 years of transition has by now produced a collective state of mind that can be described as “languishing.”
Psychologist Adam Grant famously described languishing as a state of stagnation and emptiness, sitting between depression and flourishing – “the middle child of mental health.” It is the feeling of “meh,” in which one is neither suffering nor thriving – just muddling through. “Not great, not terrible,” as the saying goes.
To be precise, languishing is not hopelessness. But it is also not a space of hope. Like the characters in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, we aimlessly wait for resolution and salvation to arrive like a deus ex machina. “Maybe Ukraine wins and we are all absorbed into the big European family and live happily ever after?” Or as Gen Z would say: “Delulu”.
Dealing with the state of languishing requires elaborate mindfulness. One way to cope is latch onto the Balkan weapon of irony as a tool of self-help. As the saying goes: “Comedy is tragedy plus time.” Perhaps we can draw some optimism from the fact that it could have been worse.
Adam Grant advises those who languish to find flow and focus on small wins – to absorb in active challenges and daily progress to fill the sense of emptiness. Which seems like just a fancier, secular version of Reinhold Niebuhr’s prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
True wisdom may also be found in accepting that there might be a fundamental problem with our very own understanding of progress which makes it feel elusive. As Orwell notes: “progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.”