Civil Society & Think Tank Forum 2026 (CSF) | Pristina

The CSF is the official civil society platform of the Berlin Process, which aims to promote regional cooperation, economic integration and the European perspective of the Western Balkans. In Pristina, it brought together more than 150 civil society organisations and think tanks from the six Western Balkan countries.

Watch the speech by Edin Hajdarpasic and Valbona Zeneli.

Edin Hajdarpašić (foto private archive)

You mentioned that Europe has no counter narrative. What did you mean? 

Let me suggest some examples. Over the past few decades, we’ve seen a number of far-right figures carry out violent attacks across Europe, the US, and New Zealand. These figures often portrayed themselves as defenders of the West and explicitly invoked examples from Balkan history in their manifestos. The response of both politicians and historians, beyond the standard condemnation of any violence, has been to say that these manifestos got both the past and present wrong. If a far-right insurrectionist in 2011 styles himself after the defenders of Vienna against the Ottomans in 1683, then the usual liberal response was to say that the attacker misunderstood, distorted, or oversimplified a complex history. But even as it tries to fact-check and debunk it, that response ultimately re-centers the clash of civilizations view as the starting story. And decades of such fact-checking have not reduced the power of “the clash” narratives. Just this month, the US Secretary of State used his visit to Greece to talk again about Western civilization and its struggle against mass migration. It passed without much pushback. There’s less and less difference between the manifestos of attackers and the stances of many politicians. That’s what I mean by contemporary European politics having no effective counter-narratives. A genuine challenge to such deeply ingrained narratives would provide not mere fact-checking, but a different story about Europe, one that does not revert to variations on “the defending wall” myths. While civil society can provide necessary spaces of critical reflection, broader counter-narratives would have to emerge from collective and creative efforts across European societies. Perhaps I’m missing something, but I just do not see much of that kind of self-reflection underway in contemporary EU.

What kind of examples you can offer to a Balkan audience of the larger world they should reconnect to, drawing from their history? 

In the relationship between Europe and the Balkans, the pull of gravity toward Europe has often blinded us to other relationships to other parts of the world. I think it’s really important to expand our perspectives and to hone the skill of comparative analysis, of trying to understand and connect with other parts of the world. I don’t have one specific prescription or place that we should look to, but I do think that it’s very important to try to situate our Europe-Balkans relations in other kinds of analytical and global frameworks. In my talk I tried to discuss some histories of liberalism in the Balkans and also more broadly. But that’s just one case study and there could be more. Among other things, critical attention to global connections has the potential to help us recover our region’s long-neglected cosmopolitan histories and attitudes. For too long, it’s been too easy for Balkan nationalists to volunteer themselves to be good little soldiers in patrolling the defending walls of Europe, which ultimately meant defining oneself against the non-European. But the actual histories of Balkan societies are much richer, they’re also connected to what was called “non-European.” I hope that critical inquiry has potential to make us less provincial and more worldly, more humanist in Edward Said’s sense of the word.

You concluded the conference with a very inspiring message. Could you share it with our readers too? 

You know, what I said was kind of improvised, but basically it was about this very common metaphor about the Balkans as a bridge. Usually it’s the bridge between cultures, between religions, between East and West, and so on. And I was thinking about that and about so many people who live here or live abroad, like myself, but remain deeply connected to this region in various ways. And I wanted to think about what kinds of lives we could build out of that. It’s very difficult to live on a bridge. A bridge might get someone’s strategic attention, but a bridge is not a home. For me, I hope different metaphors and different discourses will emerge, not with the Balkans at the center of the world, but with us more comfortable with inhabiting the world we live in. Given the state of the world, that is obviously very hard. There are so many fires burning around the world, whether from the wars that have been started or from the climate collapse that we’re living through. There is so much to be done. And there are many people who are actively engaged in that on a local level, like with activism around rivers, forests, and nature across different Balkan states. So my hope is that, in our own different ways, we can contribute to making a world which we can actually inhabit with others.