Green European Journal: Why did you write this book now?  

Vedran Horvat: There are at least two reasons, one personal and one more political. The first one is the desire to wrap up 20 years of work helping to create the conditions for green politics in the region. This period of my life – and this is the second reason – coincides with the developments that led many green movements to evolve into parties, and some of these parties to become successful, or at least present in institutional politics. In Zagreb, they even managed to take power at the municipal level. While that was always the ambition, it was hardly imaginable at the beginning.  

I didn’t cover Croatia in the book because I was too directly involved, and I felt that I could not be observant and neutral enough – although this book does not pretend to be “neutral”: it is biased, in the sense that it is written from within.   

Green politics came later to the Balkans compared to other parts of Europe. Why is that?  

In comparison to Western Europe, but also to Central Eastern Europe, the region was lagging because of the many conflicts it went through. The 1990s were a period of war, violence, and wild privatisation. Public discourse was dominated by nationalist parties. The only alternatives appeared to be civic-oriented social-democratic forces or liberal forces that opposed nationalism, political violence against minorities, and the plundering of everything public. At that time, it was almost unimaginable to have a niche for green politics to emerge.  

Earlier, before the war started, things looked more promising. When countries declared independence and Yugoslavia collapsed in the early 1990s, there were green initiatives, and green politicians were elected to parliament in Croatia and Slovenia. Then the war came; it took more than two decades for green politics to reemerge. During that time, ecological thought was present only in civil society movements and organisations, which were mostly made up of activists fighting environmental degradation across the region. They didn’t even think of becoming part of institutional politics as they considered it a dirty thing. When green political alternatives began to emerge, they often started with urbanism or housing, or with the fight against state capture.  

Is conflict with existing political systems a defining feature of emerging green movements?  

It may seem contradictory, but in many cases conflict is crucial because it provides visibility and attention. Antagonisation is what allows green movements to establish their presence. Every time you manage to challenge the dominant discourse and the interests of those in power, you gather some public attention, you win some small particles of their power. With time, this creates a new collective subjectivity, and people start to follow. At that point you can begin to offer more constructive ideas that are not necessarily a result of conflict. In Serbia and Croatia, for example, conflict enabled the galvanisation that happens when people get together and mobilise, and quickly find agreement and consensus in the face of external hostility.  

Hostility is intense and real. It entails threats to your personal and professional life. It’s not easy to be green or green-left in an environment in which you are constantly criminalised and hunted by tabloids. In Serbia, for example, nobody can be jealous of a green politician. The ruling party or other political competitors or opponents try, quite literally, to eliminate you. Besides, once you declare that you have the ambition to enter institutional politics, you immediately lose some of your legitimacy, the ethical superiority associated with the civil society movement. People will ask, “Why do you need that in your life? I mean, you’re nice people. Politics will ruin your life.” There is a huge risk that you get lost in these attacks because you have either no time or no capacity to deal with them.  

If political involvement is perceived as dirty and subject to attacks, what leads a protest movement to evolve into a political project?  

At some point you hit the wall and realise the limits of what you can achieve through the movement. You can prevent some detrimental developments, mobilise people against an industrial project, or against commodification or gentrification. But it is never enough to change things. Corporations and political elites will move on and continue with business as usual, and you will be left out. In order to have a seat at the table, to be in parliament, even as opposition, you need to jump over the fence into another terrain. 

If you don’t keep a presence in the streets, you risk losing your constituencies.

Among the Greens, there was always this idea of having one leg in the streets and one in the institutions. The risk is that when you finally manage to have one leg in the institutions, you realise the other leg is frozen. It is a challenge to keep life in that second leg, either because you get excited by institutional politics or because politics absorbs all the critical mass of people – activists, thinkers, media workers. But if you don’t keep a presence in the streets, you risk losing your constituencies. In the Serbian case, Greens are managing to keep a good balance. They still have a few think tanks and movements outside the party, with whom they can coordinate and synchronise. 

How do you keep credibility in the streets once you become active in institutional politics?  

It implies distance, at least at the public level. There’s nothing conspirational about it, but in the Balkans, the distinction between civil society movements and political parties is quite sharp. In Western Europe, lines are more blurred, and you can move more easily between the two realms. But in this region, once you become a politician, you lose all your activist credibility. And even if you go back to activism later on, people will not count on you because you have shown your political ambition. You’ll always have this label.  

This passage from activism to institutional politics is also one from protest or ecological struggle to ideological articulation.  

How does ideological articulation take place? If you start as a single-issue movement against state capture or environmental degradation, it takes quite a leap to elaborate a fully-fledged ideological vision.  

Ideology doesn’t come all of a sudden. Ideological elements are often unwritten within movements, but they are discussed thousands of times. There is a shared understanding of the values around which a movement is built. In Serbia, people who were part of the movement behind the Zeleno-Levi Front (Green–Left Front) were always quite homogeneous in terms of values. They combined social rights with environmental protection, they put forward economic alternatives.  

But there are some big questions, such as the status of Kosovo, the Srebrenica genocide, the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Your positions on those issues serve as the coordinates through which people place you on the map. Parties may tend to postpone this moment, and this is a real test for them. If you want to be relevant, you can’t avoid that positioning forever. The Zeleno-Levi Front hasn’t fully walked through that door yet.  

You can argue that these issues are not crucial for Serbian society to live well. What you need instead is good public services and less corruption. But the public space is contaminated by a regime that pushes you into that trap. If you want to become a party with 15 or 20 per cent of the vote, at one point you will have to either expose yourself on those sensitive issues, or become powerful enough to completely change the discourse, in a way that those issues become irrelevant. But I don’t think this latter option is realistic at the moment.  

Have established green forces in the rest of Europe helped the emergence of green politics in the Western Balkans?  

There have been various levels of cooperation with the international green movement. The European Green Party (EGP) has long been an important channel. Even though the EGP hasn’t always had a systemic focus on the region, it has offered a platform to learn about how green politics operates in other European countries and at EU level. This European connection was very important for green actors in the Western Balkans. Over time, some of those identified by the EGP as potential partners in the region turned out to not be authentic agents of change. Some of them were simply political entrepreneurs who thought that politics was business, and tried to find shortcuts instead of building a movement. These initiatives never worked out because they had PR visibility but no social power, no ideology, no expertise. 

Another channel is the cooperation with green members of EU national parliaments or the European Parliament. It helps when prominent green voices stand up to support the local fight against harmful projects and environmental degradation, or endorse the European aspirations of Western Balkan states. This cooperation can take the form of resolutions in the European Parliament or Germany’s Bundestag, for example. It helps European Greens to understand immediately which forces they can meaningfully collaborate with, and it helps green movements in the region to understand where they stand in terms of ideology vis-à-vis their EU counterparts. For instance, green movements in the Western Balkans often have a stronger eco-social inclination compared to established Green parties in the rest of Europe.  

While this kind of collaboration is often fruitful, there are also some “centre-periphery” tensions playing out too, as is the case with Serbia’s lithium. European interests can collide with national interests. 

The third avenue has been cooperation at the municipal level with cities like Naples and Barcelona. These were not necessarily green administrations, but there were shared values to build on. This created valuable exchange considering that most green movements in the Balkans emerged at the municipal level.  

In the last few years, climate issues have been catapulted to the centre of European political debate, first with the mass demonstrations of Fridays For Future and then with the European Green Deal and its regional versions. Were these positive developments for green movements in the Western Balkans?  

There is no simple answer to this question. On a general level, the fact that the European Commission – and the EU as a whole – took the path of a green transition is a message that can be helpful for green forces in the region, but there are many traps too. First, it is primarily governments that are involved in implementing green transition measures or get access to funding related to the Green Deal. And in most cases, governments are direct political opponents of the Greens. What should Greens say in these cases?  

If they have a presence in the institutions, they can expose governments’ inability to deliver on green measures, either because they lack competence or they are intrinsically opposed to ecological ideas. In captured and corrupted states, jobs and investments linked to the green transition will be given to friends and clientelistic networks. Wind farms will serve as cash machines for the families of politicians. This does significant damage because it leads people to link the green transition with corruption.  

Green movements can develop their programmes, but they are far from being able to deliver because they lack political power. There remains a gap between talk and implementation. And even if you close this gap, as in Zagreb, you need time to transform the whole system in a way that you can deliver.  

Green movements in the Balkans have been consistently pro-European, but they find themselves in a difficult position reconciling their EU aspirations with the bloc’s push for mining strategic metals in the region (you mentioned the conflict around Serbia’s lithium earlier). How to square the circle?  

This tension has been there for years, but now you have some EU Green politicians openly saying, “If it’s not us, China will extract”. If you respond that you don’t want extraction at all, it appears that you are against European interests. Serbia finds itself at a crossroads: is it going to become an EU member? President Aleksandar Vučić has been playing with sticks and carrots for more than a decade, and he’s good at it. But the people of Serbia are completely split on EU accession.  

As long as Balkan Greens are outside the European institutions, they won’t be able to significantly transform green politics at the European level.

There is a fundamental contrast between the hegemonic powers in the EU, including German car manufacturers, and the public interest of the Serbian people, who will be affected by mining. For years, the European Union has been rightly scrutinising Serbia’s lack of rule of law, of transparency. But when it came to the strategic interest linked to extracting lithium, suddenly all the issues that had been thoroughly scrutinised in the enlargement process disappeared. For any authentic green force, this is not acceptable. And people see this kind of hypocrisy, they recognise it.  

Besides, we should talk about extractivism in general: is a green transition based on an extractive model what we really want? This debate concerns Serbia but also Portugal, Czechia, even Germany, where there are critical mineral resources.  

The Green Deal was the flagship of Ursula von der Leyen’s first term as Commission president. Now there’s a so-called backlash against climate policies, and many Green parties have paid the price at the polls. Could green movements from the Western Balkans, with their roots in municipalism and their eco-social focus, bring the renewal Europe’s Greens are seeking?  

I hope so. But there’s one big obstacle: Western Balkan countries are not EU members, and will not be able to be part of any institutional political work for ten more years in the best-case scenario.  

As long as Balkan Greens are outside the European institutions, they won’t be able to significantly transform green politics at the European level. Croatia and Slovenia have elected a Green MEP each, and that’s a positive development. They might be protagonists of the more left-oriented green politics. Maybe in 10 years, there will be five or six MEPs from the Balkans, which is still not a big group, but maybe enough to give a new direction. I think EU Greens should really have enlargement as a top political priority.