Lika nije tema ovog teksta. Ona je razlog zbog kojeg ga pišem. U posljednjih pet godina sustavno sam se bavila temama budućnosti Hrvatske i Europe, kroz svoj novinarski rad, ali i kroz suradnju s brojnim hrvatskim i europskim organizacijama, projektima i inicijativama, od kojih je posljednja ona koju smo u Beču osnovali prošle godine, Europe’s Futures Initiative, a čija sam jedina članica iz Hrvatske.

Vremena koja dolaze, zahtijevaju ozbiljan odnos prema stvarnosti, razložnost i odgovornost prema budućnosti. Ono što gledamo u Lici, prije svega je neodgovorno. Budućnost se stvara uspostavom povjerenja, razumijevanjem onoga što je sada i što dolazi.

Za serijal Budućnost Europe koji sam snimala prije četiri godine, nakon najave da će Vlada nuditi 200 tisuća kuna za povratak ljudi u Hrvatsku, otišla sam upravo u Liku pitajući se bi li se neki budući Tesla vratio u svoj rodni kraj u kojem se prije samo nekoliko desetljeća govorilo da mozak vrijedi tri njemačke marke.

Budućnost Europe, epizoda 200 tisuća

Tada nismo znali za otpadni užas, te desetke tisuće tona otrovnog smeća naguranog u nekadašnji silos, koji je nekad bio jedno od središta lokalne ekonomije.

Govorila sam u serijalu i o uspavanoj ljepotici, našoj Trnoružici - Slavoniji, koja eto, samo što se nije probudila, pa ju je i ove godine, osim suše, poharala i nova svinjska kuga…

Budućnost Europe, epizoda Trnoružica

Bavila sam se u tom serijalu i umjetnom inteligencijom, znanjem, oporavkom i otpornošću, regionalnim razvojem, konkurentnošću, svim temama koje su bitne za tu našu zajedničku budućnost, pa i o vanjskoj politici, zadnja epizoda koja je najavila rusku agresiju na Ukrajinu, emitirana je sredinom veljače 2022. Valjda je najgore biti prorok u vlastitom selu. Kako god da se selo zvalo.

Cijeli serijal Budućnost Europe

No, vratimo se na razlog pisanja teksta i moju malu reminiscenciju na zadnjih pola desetljeća. Lika. Ona sada postaje paradigma. Ne samo zbog onoga što je završilo u tlu, ili mafijaške međunarodne hobotnice koja je s lokalnom prevukla desetke tisuća tona kroz slobodni Schengenski prostor, onaj kojem ne daj bože da prismrdi koji afrički mladac koji ovdje traži posao. Jer ako u našu EU kao čovjek ulazi ilegalno, onda mu se može dogoditi da na granici mora klečati i vikati naše stare pozdrave. Dolje ljudski, amo mafijaški otrovni otpadu!

Lika dakle postaje paradigma za sve ono što je nestalo iz javne politike: odgovornost i vjerodostojnost. Građani podatke dobivaju nakon skandala, rokove nakon pritiska, kažnjavanje odgovornih sve rjeđe. Povjerenje se gubi, informacijski prostor se truje i čini se kao da živimo manipulaciju percepcijom stvarnosti. Hibridni rat protiv vlastitog stanovništva. Kao da već svi nisu dovoljno sluđeni.

No, opći politički problem našeg vremena jest takav da se svaki izbori tretiraju kao pitanje života i smrti, a ne redovno servisiranje države, mandat koji je dan i koji se može izgubiti, pa opet dobiti. Doba političke polarizacije i fatalizma, vrijeme kataklizme i straha, možda tome i pogoduje. Danas se iscrpljuje javni prostor, a odgovori na strateški ključna pitanja se odgađaju ili zamagljuju. Zakoni kao da služe tome da se nikome ne dokaže krivnja. Oni koje tereti USKOK, nakon koju godinu više ne tereti. Abrakadabra.

Oni koji će s posljedicama živjeti dvadeset ili trideset godina nemaju ni približno jednaku moć, naši građani, pogotovo oni mladi. Jer u njih se svi kunu. Oni su budućnost. Ta koju se truje i na koju se ne misli.

Razmišljajući što sa svojim iskustvom i znanjem uopće mogu, uspostavila sam mjerljivi model za suradnju među generacijama u zajedničkom odlučivanju, koju sam nazvala Zajednički mandat.

Na ideju sam došla nakon što sam lani sudjelovala na građanskom panelu o međugeneracijskoj pravednosti u Bruxellesu i pričala s europskim povjerenikom za mlade, kulturu i sport, Glenom Micallefom.

Europska komisija je u ožujku 2026. usvojila prvu Strategiju o međugeneracijskoj pravednosti. Osnovna premisa zvuči jednostavno - današnje odluke moraju povećavati, a ne smanjivati sutrašnje mogućnosti, dok se koristi i odgovornosti moraju pravedno dijeliti među generacijama.

Samo 38 posto Europljana smatra da su ishodi u njihovu životu uglavnom pravedni.

U Hrvatskoj je na prošle europske izbore izašlo 20, da dobro ste pročitali dvadeset posto građana. Vjerovatno ste i vi bili među njima. Zašto bismo glasali i zašto nas se tiče budućnost u kojoj bismo sudjelovali?

Najbrutalniji obračun međugeneracijske nepravde vidimo danas u pitanju klime.

Vremenski i klimatski ekstremi u Europi proizveli su oko 822 milijarde eura gubitaka u 45 godina, a četvrtina tog iznosa nastala je u samo posljednje četiri godine. Klimatsko nedjelovanje do kraja stoljeća moglo bi zemlje EU do konca stoljeća stajati i dvoznamenkasti iznos BDP-a.

Građanski panel, je koncem prošle godine u Bruxellesu okupio 150 nasumično odabranih građana iz svih 27 država članica Europske unije. Trećinu sudionika činili su mladi od 16 do 29 godina. Na koncu su se svi usuglasili oko 24 preporuke o tome kako pravednije raspodijeliti mogućnosti, koristi, terete i odgovornosti među generacijama.

Nije me najviše impresionirala činjenica da je toliko različitih ljudi uspjelo postići dogovor. Važnije mi je bilo vidjeti pod kojim uvjetima suradnja postaje moguća. Razlike nisu nestale. Nitko nije morao odustati od svojega iskustva, interesa ili svjetonazora. Ali ljudi su dobili vrijeme, činjenice, jasan postupak i obvezu da na kraju proizvedu nešto zajedničko. Nisu bili publika u tuđem političkom procesu, nego sudionici s mandatom. Odgovornosti prema budućnosti.

U Hrvatskoj se građani, pogotovo mladi, nekad zovu da „kažu svoje mišljenje”, ali rijetko im prepustimo dio odgovornosti za definiranje problema i oblikovanje rješenja. Starije pak uglavnom promatramo kao biračko tijelo, trošak mirovinskog i zdravstvenog sustava ili skupinu kojoj treba nešto objasniti. Jedne svodimo na budućnost bez sadržaja, druge na prošlost s previše sadržaja, premda i jedni i drugi žive u istoj sadašnjosti i ovise o istim institucijama, glasači su i odgovorni su za tu sadašnjost i budućnost.

Zajednički mandat koncipirala sam kao model kojim se mlađe i starije generacije, uz pomoć političkih veterana i mladih lokalnih zastupnika, nalaze oko konkretne teme. Taj, zajednički mandat počinje ondje gdje simbolična participacija završava - kod obveze da se problem precizno definira, izabere izvedivo rješenje, imenuje odgovorna osoba, utvrdi rok i javno pokaže rezultat.

Pitanje političkog povjerenja i budućnosti pratila sam godinama prije toga.

Kao stipendistica programa Europe’s Futures, Instituta za humanističke znanosti u Beču (IWM) i Zaklade ERSTE u akademskoj godini 2022./2023., radila sam na projektu Voters 2024: Who Is the Future?. Pitala sam što se događa s demokracijom kada institucije govore o mladima kao o budućnosti, ali ih rijetko prepoznaju kao političke građane sadašnjosti. Iza pitanja izlaznosti na izbore nalazilo se dublje pitanje: može li Europa u vremenu digitalne transformacije, dezinformacija, rata i ekonomske nesigurnosti obnoviti povjerenje onih koji će najdulje živjeti s njezinim odlukama?

Za „Glasače 2024” dobila sam 2024. Nagradu Europa za televizijsko novinarstvo, koju Hrvatsko novinarsko društvo dodjeljuje u partnerstvu s Uredom Europskog parlamenta i Predstavništvom Europske komisije u Hrvatskoj.

Zajednički mandat gledam kao nastavak svih tih stvari. U prvom hrvatskom pilotu za isti sam stol stavila umirovljenike, učenike viših razreda srednjih škola, uz pomoć mladih lokalnih političara i veterana hrvatske politike. Taj izbor nije bio simboličan.

Umirovljenici donose iskustvo posljedica. Pamte odluke, obećanja, izgrađene i ugašene sustave, ono što je zajednica nekada imala i ono što je izgubila. Prvi birači nalaze se na prijelazu između formalnog političkog odrastanja i prvog stvarnog iskustva demokratske odgovornosti. Srednjoškolci će najdulje živjeti s odlukama koje donosimo danas, a ipak ih se u tim odlukama najmanje pita.

Nitko u toj skupini nije bio ukras. Mladi nisu došli poslušati starije, a stariji nisu pozvani da mladima održe lekciju. Zadatak nije bio da govore jedni o drugima, nego da zajedno odrede problem, izdvoje najviše dva prioriteta, predlože izvediv korak, imenuju odgovornu osobu i partnera te unaprijed kažu po čemu će se vidjeti je li išta napravljeno. Političari s iskustvom bili su pravedni arbitri, mladi političari koji dolaze vidjeli su što znači raditi zajedno s građanima.

To je bit Zajedničkog mandata: ne pitati samo što ljudi žele, nego što su spremni zajednički definirati, provesti, pratiti i javno provjeriti.

Takav rad uključuje i svojevrsni Future Check – provjeru odluka u odnosu na budućnost. Svaku odluku promatramo kroz nekoliko jednostavnih pitanja: Kakve će učinke imati za deset, dvadeset ili trideset godina? Tko danas dobiva korist, a tko preuzima rizik? Tko će sutra platiti trošak? Čiji glas nedostaje? Hoće li odluka povećati ili smanjiti razlike? Može li se njezin učinak mjeriti i objaviti?

Povjerenje se u Hrvatskoj često tretira kao osobina građana. Kao da su ljudi po naravi cinični, nezainteresirani ili nezahvalni. Takvo objašnjenje oslobađa institucije odgovornosti. Povjerenje nije raspoloženje koje se može naručiti kampanjom. Ono je odnos koji nastaje iz ponovljenog iskustva: mogu li saznati tko je odgovoran, mogu li mu se obratiti, hoću li dobiti odgovor i mogu li nakon toga vidjeti je li moje sudjelovanje ostavilo ikakav trag?

Hrvatska je mala zemlja koja se često ponaša kao da ima neiscrpne zalihe ljudi, prostora, vode, vremena i povjerenja. Nema ih.

U velikom sustavu posljedice institucionalnog propusta ponekad se mogu privremeno apsorbirati. U maloj zemlji svaki odlazak mladog čovjeka, svaka izgubljena javna usluga, svaki zagađeni izvor, svaki propali natječaj, svaka korupcijska afera i svaki mjesec nepovjerenja ostavljaju razmjerno veću štetu. Zato oblikovanje politika usmjereno na rješenja i okrenuto budućnosti za Hrvatsku nije pomodni koncept. To je jedini racionalan način opstanka.

To ne znači da svi moramo misliti isto. Zajednički mandat nije prisilni konsenzus ni poziv na društvo bez sukoba. Demokracija bez sukoba ne postoji. Ali postoji velika razlika između sukoba koji proizvodi bolju odluku i sukoba koji služi tome da se od odgovornosti bježi.

Firefighter from the Croatian island of Korčula is on the neighbouring Pelješac peninsula, fighting another Adriatic fire. In his hand is a bottle of water. He is not drinking from it, but he’s giving water to a tortoise. Slow-moving, extraordinarily vulnerable when fire sweeps through the maquis. The photograph was taken by another firefighter.

Tortoises and turtles hold a profound place in world mythology, frequently symbolizing creation, longevity, wisdom, and steadfast endurance across diverse cultures. Because they carry their homes on their backs and bridge land and water, their shells inspired ancient ideas of the cosmic order.

If we look today, at our house, Europe, our wisdom and order, there’s a disorder.

Hermann’s tortoise is one of those small creatures that have inhabited the Dalmatian landscape long before we turned the coast into roads, apartments, resorts, parking lots and investment opportunities. It is a protected species.

I keep thinking that this photograph tells us more about our future than words from our politicians, as we are much worse at noticing the habitat that makes our life possible.

This summer brought prolonged heat and drought, helping fires spread and intensify. People died, homes were destroyed, yet, European politicians seemed to care more about people breaking barriers in Ceuta. They put together extraordinary statement, while huge areas of Mediterranean were on fire. The real border being crossed this summer, unfortunately, may not be that fence around Ceuta, but the boundary between the climate in which our societies were built and the climate in which they will have to survive. And there is, I’m afraid, no border police for that.

Biodiversity is one of those words that almost guarantees political boredom.But it is not something involving insects, wetlands and environmental NGO’s and to discuss after we have dealt with growth, security, migration, competitiveness, technology, defence and jobs. It is the infrastructure.

The European Environment Agency says 81 percent of protected habitats in the EU are in poor or bad condition, along with 63 percent of other protected species. Its latest assessment says biodiversity continues to decline across Europe’s terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems.

Eighty-one percent. Imagine if 81 percent of European bridges, hospitals, telecommunication networks were in poor or bad condition. We would call it an emergency. There is no economy outside nature. No agriculture without soil and water. No food security without functioning ecosystems. No Adriatic tourism without an Adriatic landscape.

Today we listen from every major power that it cannot afford to lose the AI race and the racing track is something non-biological, something “in the cloud”. Sorry to break the spell, but the cloud has a postcode. It occupies land and requires water, lithium and rare-earth elements somewhere along its enormous physical supply chain.

UNEP warns that the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure means growing electricity consumption, water demand, electronic waste and dependence on critical minerals, some of which are extracted through environmentally damaging mining practices. The International Energy Agency projects that electricity consumption by data centres could more than double by 2030 to around 945 terawatt-hours, with AI a major driver of that growth.

AI may help us model fires, improve energy systems, predict droughts, monitor ecosystems and understand climate risks. The problem is something deeper. We are attempting to build the technologies of the twenty-first century using an economic logic inherited from the nineteenth: extract more, consume more, build more, grow faster and deal with the consequences elsewhere.

The extraction economy never disappeared, so the geography of sacrifice remains remarkably familiar. The poorest communities continue to absorb many of the externalities of somebody else’s prosperity. Even the green transition carries this contradiction. The UN estimates demand for critical energy-transition minerals could almost triple by 2030.

How much more can we take? With questions Europe is even less prepared to confront.

People will move because drought destroys livelihoods, extreme heat makes work impossible, fires repeatedly make places dangerous to inhabit. Environmental pressures rarely operates alone. Climate refugee is still not a category formally recognised in international refugee law.

Perhaps the strangest thing is that we continue discussing all this as though it were an ideological argument. But fire does not care, drought does not vote.

The atmosphere does not know whether Giorgia Meloni or Pedro Sánchez or Friedrich Merz or Marine Le Pen wins an election. Collapsing ecosystem has no ideology. Physics is politically neutral. Its consequences are not. Politicians became very good at promising citizens that limits can always be postponed until after the next election. Survival mode. Until it is no more.

The tortoise can be a symbol of survival, even they’re dissapearing with the habitat… Our own predicament is more complicated.

We know what is happening and cannot say we did not see it or knew what’s going on as there’s science behind it. The question is whether we will care before the photograph changes. Before it is no longer a firefighter giving water to a tortoise, but we are the ones searching for water.

I often think about international law and justice these days, when the world we know is tumbling, and nothing makes sense. Assad is safe under Putin and Putin is safe from ICC war crimes indicement because he has nuclear arms and he’s head of the state that is permanent member of UNSC.

I met Assad in 2008, before the Arab Spring, at the moment Nicolas Sarkozy’s France was leading an effort to bring Syria back into the international fold. Assad had begun indirect peace talks with Israel and was taking a more conciliatory position towards Lebanon. Sarkozy visited Damascus that September, ad first Western head of government to do so since the 2005 assassination of Rafik Hariri.

After our interview, Assad’s people took this photograph and sent it to my newsroom.

He was not the only global villain or war criminal I sat across from during almost thirty years in journalism.

After this week’s news from Damascus, I went back to a chapter from my 2018 book Nejednaki (Unequals) and asked AI to translate it into English, as the book was published in Croatian. I think it will be interesting read, especially ad our continent faces similar challenges like when the book was written. The name of the chapter was: Europe’s Bread.

(Chapter from the book Nejednaki, Naklada Ljevak/Ljevak Publishing house, May 2018.)

EUROPE’s BREAD

Bread does not give a man life,

nor does sleep awaken him.

A free soul builds a home.

— Khebez Dawle

A tall, striking man with slicked-back, coal-black hair was walking towards me down the long corridor. He broke into a broad smile and held out his hand.

“Good afternoon, and welcome. We have plenty of time to prepare.”

He was the head of security for the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. His handshake was firm; his glittering black eyes seemed to penetrate mine. I followed him. We entered a room with two armchairs.

“Will this work for the interview?” he asked.

My cameramen nodded.

“Yes, thank you,” I said. “When can we expect the president?”

“Exactly on time,” he said with a smile, and left.

Bashar al-Assad was an accidental president. Hafez al-Assad, the great father of the Syrian Arab Republic and leader of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party, had ruled the country with an iron hand for almost three decades, maintaining power through sectarian politics and imposing the rule of the minority Alawites over a predominantly Sunni country. A powerful intelligence and security apparatus kept watch over its citizens and, in the early 1980s, brutally crushed the first major Islamist uprising, culminating in the massacre of thousands of people in the city of Hama.

A woman from protocol rushed into the room.

“Is everything ready?” she asked sharply.

I said it was.

The doors swung open. Surrounded by security guards and advisers, the president walked in.

“Bashar. Pleased to meet you,” he said, smiling, and offered me his hand.

We sat down. As they attached his microphone, he began asking me about the situation in Croatia. He was courteous, polite, spoke quietly and was sometimes a little difficult to understand. The cameras went on, and soon the interview began.

I asked him how much he lived in the shadow of his father.

“My father was in power for thirty years and left his mark on everything in Syria, and on the region as well. It was not easy for me to take over. Every day we were compared in everything. When I became president, the intifada began in Palestine, then came the terrorist attacks of September 11, the occupation of Afghanistan, then Iraq, followed by sanctions from Europe and the United States. It was not easy,” he told me, his lips pursed beneath his small moustache.

His narrow eyes met mine with an expression that seemed almost surprised, even faintly innocent. A former student in England and an ophthalmologist by training, he had been forced into an accelerated preparation for the presidency after his elder brother Bassel, groomed to succeed their father, died in a car crash.

A year before our conversation, French president Nicolas Sarkozy had embraced Bashar al-Assad, pulled him out of international isolation and away from the label attached to Syria under George W. Bush’s declared global war on terror — that of a state aligned with the “axis of evil.”

Assad’s comeback on the international stage had been carefully prepared in France. It went so far that the respected fashion magazine Elle named the Syrian president’s British-born wife Asma one of the most stylish women in world politics.

Sarkozy needed a pan-Mediterranean alliance, and he needed its key players. At the time, he was promoting the creation of the Union for the Mediterranean, an informal alliance of some forty countries around the Mediterranean basin. Various initiatives over the years had tried to address the Mediterranean space, to reconcile the irreconcilable in the name of security and prosperity.

Sarkozy’s ambitions were Napoleonic. He wanted France to be an international leader, particularly within its traditional sphere of influence. Grand development projects and free-trade zones were announced.

German chancellor Angela Merkel did not like the idea. She believed such a project could fracture the core of the European Union and consume still more money from the European budget.

The founding document of the Union for the Mediterranean was eventually signed in Paris on 13 July 2008, with great ceremony. On the group photograph stood bitter Middle Eastern adversaries: Assad, Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The very fact of bringing them all to the same table mattered.

With Assad, Sarkozy went one step further. The following day, at the military parade on the Champs-Élysées marking France’s great national holiday, Bastille Day, he seated the Syrian president beside him as an honoured guest.

“The rapid improvement in relations with Europe began with my visit to France,” Assad told me.

“I think people have finally started to understand Syria’s role. Until now there has been a false image of us, one that some people in Europe continue to promote. We need peace, just as Europe does. We share common economic and cultural interests.”

The leader who wanted the world to like him spoke to me across a bouquet of blood-red roses placed on the table so that “the shot would look nicer.” Behind his head stood the Syrian flag.

A crew from Syrian national television marched into the room while we were filming. I asked what they were doing there. Their producer told me that they recorded every interview the president gave to foreign television channels and then rebroadcast it themselves.

I never found out whether they aired our entire conversation or merely the pictures, accompanied by an interpretation of their own.

We spoke for a long time. The questions moved from Syria’s alliance with Iran and the Iranian nuclear programme to the destabilisation of Iraq and Syria’s alleged involvement; Lebanon; the Middle East peace process; the creation of a Palestinian state and the possibility of Arab recognition of Israel; the new American president, Barack Obama, for whom Assad had nothing but praise at the beginning of his term in the White House; cooperation with Saudi Arabia, whose king had just visited Damascus.

He spoke about investment in Syria, oil and gas, and the need for dialogue in the region in order to stop “generating the despair that can fuel the growth of terrorism.”

He was calm and focused. At some of the more provocative questions he became subtly, almost elegantly passive-aggressive, but remained firm and decisive.

Then we came to human rights and freedoms in Syria.

Assad replied:

“Democracy is not a goal. It is a tool. How you use that tool is very important, because ultimately it concerns the whole of society. Society can decide what kind of democracy it needs and how much time it needs to achieve it.

“Democracy requires dialogue, national dialogue. The first step in beginning that dialogue is the media. A few years ago we introduced private media and other private institutions, such as universities. So you slowly create dialogue within society in order to develop it. And that dialogue will tell the government which direction to take.

“You cannot create democracy by decree. You can achieve it through the normal dynamics within society. But we are moving in that direction. Some think it is too fast, some think it is too slow, but in the end, as a government, you can say that you are moving as fast as possible, with minimal consequences.”

I will remember those words, and the expression on his face as he spoke them, for the rest of my life — because of everything that later happened in Syria.

He seemed genuinely to believe what he was saying.

The complexity of Syria as a political construct, and of the Middle East as a system of interconnected vessels, had always demanded vigilance, force and repression. One secular autocratic regime, Saddam Hussein’s, had already been overthrown, yet peace and stability in Iraq remained nowhere in sight years after the beginning of the “war of liberation.”

What is freedom in the Middle East?

What is democracy?

A tool? A goal? A means?

What kind of freedom?

How much freedom?

The consequences, Assad had told me, had to remain minimal.

Bashar had long since ceased to be merely the younger brother and accidental president, as he had been described at the beginning of his rule. The ophthalmologist had good eyesight. He had a clear view of the situation.

At the end of the interview, we had our photograph taken together.

When I look at that photograph today, I feel as though I am standing beside a wax figure.

A figure who would remain in place, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of blood-soaked roses, without freedom or democracy — at maximum cost.

⸻

There was probably little celebration among Arab leaders as they welcomed the year 2011.

Young people had taken to the streets shouting, “Enough.” A wave of rebellion against autocratic, archaic regimes was spreading across North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Analysts called it “the greatest transformation of Arab societies since decolonisation.”

Social networks became instruments of political struggle.

The territory of Sarkozy’s Union for the Mediterranean was boiling.

The world supported the slogans of Arab youth and believed that an authentic revolution was coming, one that would finally bring the principles of liberal democracy to Europe’s neighbourhood.

Three years after launching his initiative as a “space of cooperation and stability,” Sarkozy stood before the European Council in Brussels.

“The Arab revolutions belong to the Arabs,” he declared triumphantly as he and British prime minister David Cameron called for military intervention in Libya in March 2011.

Almost a century after the Sykes-Picot Agreement — the 1916 Franco-British arrangement that drew Middle Eastern borders according to imperial spheres of influence at the height of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse — Paris and London were once again arguing for giving Arab peoples a free hand in their struggle for freedom.

With a little aerial assistance from them to remove the troublesome dictators.

An entire century had been shaped by reactions to the Sykes-Picot order, reflected in some of the major political ideologies that emerged in the Middle East, from Nasserism in Egypt to Ba’athism in Iraq and Syria, both rooted in pan-Arab nationalism.

Syria and Iraq, modern entities born from the Sykes-Picot settlement, underwent similar transitions: from monarchical protectorates to independent republics dominated by strongmen, through brutally suppressed rebellions and, eventually, bloody wars.

The chronology of 2011 was intense even by the standards of historically turbulent periods.

From January to March, mass protests or armed uprisings swept across the Mediterranean basin.

The West seemed caught by surprise.

Obama’s America largely left the matter in the hands of a Europe whose attention and interests were scattered, and which still lacked a common foreign or security policy.

Washington, meanwhile, killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

There was no end in sight to the crisis in Egypt. The liberal tendencies of the groups that had initiated the uprising were gradually overtaken by the political interests of the Muslim Brotherhood, banned under Mubarak.

Only two months separated the overthrow of Gaddafi’s regime, supported by Sarkozy and Cameron through the so-called Libyan transitional authority, from Gaddafi’s brutal killing.

In March 2011, a group of teenagers in the southern Syrian city of Daraa were detained for chanting anti-government slogans.

Every day, more people took to the streets. At first they protested the arrests. Then their voices grew louder and louder, demanding Assad’s departure.

The uprising began spreading through Syrian cities.

“People must never stop being afraid of you,” advisers told Assad inside the presidential palace in Damascus.

The worried former British student now had to prove that he was as strong as his father.

He watched what was happening elsewhere.

His generals reminded him of the tactics Hafez al-Assad had used to crush the Islamist uprising thirty years earlier.

There could be no yielding.

No surrender of power.

The structure had to survive.

“Democracy is a tool. The consequences must be minimal.”

I imagine Assad himself must have thought about his own words in those days.

When he chose to crush the uprising in blood, did the president-ophthalmologist lose sight of the game and shoot himself in the foot?

By deciding to intervene, he first released the accumulated anger of Syria’s Sunni population — and then the long-suppressed spirit of Islamism, which a few years later culminated in the occupation of large parts of the country by ISIS.

Beneath Syria’s dusty, torn flag lay hundreds of thousands of bodies, millions of displaced people and the utterly destroyed social fabric of the socialist Arab republic.

In the summer of 2011, Nicolas Sarkozy said Assad’s actions were causing irreparable damage.

A year later, with the war already raging, he demanded the departure of his former guest of honour because, as the French president put it, Assad’s massacres were provoking disgust around the world.

That same year, France and the United States spearheaded the creation of the “Friends of Syria” group, which recognised the Free Syrian Army and representatives of the opposition associated with it as partners.

Soon, the Syrian war had become a regional and international battlefield of competing interests.

The Assad regime refused to be shaken.

It declared that the “red line” would be crossed only when it could no longer provide Syrians with bread at a subsidised price.

Since the 1960s, subsidised bread had been one of the Syrian state’s instruments for maintaining social peace. Before the war, statistics suggested that bread supplied some forty per cent of Syrians’ caloric needs.

At the time of the popular uprising, wheat harvests were poor.

The government had to work even harder to maintain the old price.

As war spread across the country, Assad’s regime sold bread only in urban centres under government control.

Deir ez-Zor province, the country’s oil-rich breadbasket, came under siege.

The state system for supplying subsidised bread collapsed completely.

By the time the price finally had to rise amid the vortex of war, Syria’s red line had long since been crossed.

It no longer meant bread available to everyone.

It meant a fundamental struggle for bare survival.

And when the black flag of Islamic State began flying over parts of Syria, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s army set about imposing its own order.

ISIS fighters distributed a leaflet to those who remained in the territories under their control.

Among the social services it promised was a simple sentence:

“Bread will be available to everyone.”

⸻

“In Syria, the bread supplied by the government was more than food. It meant stability. Rich people ate the same bread as poor people. As long as there was that bread, we thought everything would be all right.

“What happened over the past years made us understand that the real ‘government bread’ is actually the people, not the loaf we were given. If you want to build a safe and stable society, you have to invest in the bricks from which it is made. And those bricks are people.”

The man telling me this was Anas Maghrebi, the singer of a Syrian rock band.

“That is why we took the same name the government used for that bread — Khebez Dawle. To us, the name means the real bread of a society: its people.

“Our songs are testimonies to what happened in Syria, seen through the eyes of four young men.

“Military service is compulsory in Syria. We did not want to go to war. We did not want to kill our brothers. Families were breaking apart because one brother was on Assad’s side and another on the rebels’ side.

“And then suddenly people appeared in Syria who had nothing to do with our country.

“So many agendas. Tiny Syria became a battlefield for the whole world.

“And then you start asking yourself whether it is worth staying and dying.

“Dying for whom?

“And for what?”

Anas and the other members of the rising rock band Khebez Dawle reached Europe in one of the thousands of inflatable boats leaving the Turkish coast for Greece.

Describing their journey across the sea, Anas told me:

“We expected to land on some rocks, but there were people standing on the shore, waving at us and shouting, ‘Land here!’

“They ran towards us. They were shocked.”

Usually, he said, those people saw large groups of sad, desperate human beings overwhelmed by hysteria; exhausted children.

Instead, this dinghy delivered a group of musicians who were smiling and speaking English.

“When I think about it now, the situation was fairly bizarre. It looked as though some band had crossed the sea to hand out its CDs and then go home again.”

I met Anas Maghrebi in September 2015.

It was a Saturday morning.

Since the beginning of that summer, thousands of refugees from Syria had been arriving in Greece by boat from Turkey, then moving in columns through Macedonia, Serbia and Croatia — or through Hungary or Slovenia — towards Austria and from there, in most cases, to the promised land: Germany.

Turkey, which had taken in more than two million Syrian refugees since the beginning of the war, was itself in political chaos that summer.

In June, Erdoğan’s ruling AKP had failed to win the majority required to form a government. A civic Kurdish party had entered parliament. Coalition negotiations followed and collapsed; by the end of August, new elections had been called for the first day of November.

Meanwhile, Turkey had suffered several terrorist attacks, and Erdoğan responded with an increasingly hard hand. Repression of Kurds in the east continued, while their relatives across the Syrian border fought alongside Western allies to clear territory of ISIS.

People were fleeing in huge numbers.

When the columns of people finally arrived at Europe’s gates, the entire construction upon which Europe’s rules of a “common area of freedom and solidarity” had been built seemed to collapse.

Schengen.

Dublin.

Agreements on borders and free movement.

Rules governing asylum and other forms of international protection, named after European cities.

To say that they had become dead letters on paper would be an understatement.

We arranged to meet in Maksimir Park in Zagreb.

On Saturday mornings it is crowded: colourful balloons, children carrying clouds of pink candyfloss, families heading towards the zoo.

I sat down at the restaurant by the entrance.

How would we recognise one another?

Soon I spotted four young men standing in the shade of a nearby tree.

I waved.

They came towards me.

“Anas. Nice to meet you,” one of them said.

He ordered freshly squeezed orange juice.

When the waiter brought him a one-decilitre glass in which a single ice cube floated miserably in the pale juice, Anas picked it up, stared at the sorry serving and raised an eyebrow in disbelief.

I burst out laughing.

He looked at me.

“Yes, unfortunately, this is not beautiful ancient Damascus, with thousands of stalls squeezing oranges into great jugs of juice,” I said.

He burst out laughing too.

“What do you call it?” he asked. “Cultural differences?”

When the war began, Anas had been a student at the University of Damascus.

He was born and raised in a small town between the capital and Homs. He sang beautifully, so his father had sent him to the mosque to study religious chants.

Eventually his path took him to Lebanon.

The situation there was unbearable.

In a small, sectarian country that reflected all the complexity of Middle Eastern relations, there was almost one Syrian refugee for every Lebanese citizen.

There was no work.

Certainly not for Syrian musicians.

The young men came together and made a decision.

They would move on.

“What happened to us was a normal human reaction,” Anas explained. “People try to reach a place where they can be active and productive — a place that should exist for every one of us on this enormous planet called Earth.

“To be human, we have to be productive. We have to act. We cannot live as parasites.

“I want to create some kind of value. I don’t want to die in despair.

“After everything, I think I could survive anywhere.”

That was how he explained his decision, and the band’s decision, to head for Europe.

They first travelled from Lebanon to Turkey.

I asked him how, exactly, one finds a smuggler.

A fellow Syrian had given them a phone number.

The network was so extensive, Anas told me, that smugglers openly approached Syrians when they saw them on the streets of Turkish cities.

Their first “liaison officer” organised the itinerary and connected them with the people who would guide them onward.

First they were put into a van with another twenty people, all of them lying on top of one another.

In complete darkness, with barely any air, the first stage lasted for hours.

Eventually they were unloaded beside a forest, where they waited for another contact, another van, which took them to the coast.

There they waited again, for hours, until a third person in the smuggling chain arrived with a boat.

The smugglers themselves never boarded the dinghies.

On the spot, they briefly taught one of the refugees how to start the engine, then sent them off towards Greece.

There were fewer people in Anas’s boat, but some dinghies carried as many as forty souls.

That fact alone, in his view, was criminal.

“And now, when I look back, the part at sea seems like the easiest part of the whole journey.”

⸻

Croatia had entered a state of siege.

The politicians in power tried to remain humane, to organise quickly for an “emergency situation.”

Regional tensions resurfaced, this time not over questions from the past, but over living human beings appearing at national borders: how they should move, where they should be accommodated, how movement should be regulated along what had by then officially become known as the “Western Balkan route.”

I argued with fellow journalists about terminology.

“Three hundred migrants crossed the border.”

“Five hundred refugees crossed the border.”

That was how the news was reported every day.

I asked them what would be wrong with simply saying that three hundred or five hundred people had crossed the border that day, regardless of a legal status that had not yet even been formally assigned to them, because all previously existing rules and regulations at the borders had effectively been suspended.

Many stared at me blankly when I spoke about the dangers of dehumanisation.

Among those who had travelled from Greece to the Croatian border were Anas and his bandmates.

They crossed at night.

The police detained them.

“The story from the police station in Ilok is something I will never forget,” Anas told me.

“They caught us crossing a field. We explained that we were a band from Syria. At first they didn’t believe us, covered in mud and dust as we were.

“I remember giving one of the policemen a CD. He said he was a rocker himself, that apparently he used to play drums in some thrash-metal band.”

Then the story became even more bizarre.

“They checked YouTube right there in front of us.

“The whole thing became completely surreal when, suddenly, one of our songs started playing inside the police station.

“I caught myself almost meditating deeply on everything happening around me.

“So here I am. Detained. Under arrest. Trying to persuade the policeman — the same policeman who has detained me — to listen to my music.

“And I thought: this is a victory.

“The music changed everything. It changed that difficult, tense situation.

“And then the policeman said something beautiful: ‘Man, music really does unite us all.’

“You begin to understand another human being when you see them in another situation, in another context.”

We are human beings, Anas said.

And as human beings, we are the same.

“I remember that the song he played was the fourth track on our album. It is about victims and imprisonment.

“The refrain says: In darkness no one can live except the jailer and the victim. But in the light, or once you are free, you can build a home for everyone. A free soul can build a home for everyone…”

⸻

In Damascus, at least until the war, there had been a Zagreb Students’ Club.

It brought together people who, during the rule of Assad’s father and through exchanges within the Non-Aligned Movement, had come to study in Yugoslavia.

Many travelled home for the holidays by car, bus or train.

Many Syrians stayed in this part of Europe.

And when the refugees arrived, these people were among the first to rush to the borders to translate and help.

Syria is an important part of the Mediterranean circle: the same cultural space, a historically intertwined heritage.

Of all the stories I have covered in my life, this one felt, in some way, the most personal.

For years I had reported, made documentaries and films about wars and their consequences, their victims and refugees. I had read, travelled, anticipated.

And then, when that global story finally knocked on our own door, I was surprised that everyone here was so surprised.

In this case, we behaved entirely like Europeans.

For months before that autumn of 2015, Belgrade’s parks had been filling with people. Refugees had been dying on railway tracks in Macedonia. For years in Greece they had slept in squares and under bridges, or had been crammed into reception centres.

Yet all of it remained “far away from us.”

Far away from Europe.

We were incapable of confronting ourselves. How, then, were we supposed to confront that vast world beyond us?

In the real, elemental sense.

Two days before the column of people at the Hungarian border — soon to be securely fenced off with Europe’s barbed wire — changed direction and began moving towards Croatia, I was sitting in a Brussels hotel with what one usually calls a senior diplomatic official from my country.

A television hung above our heads in the hotel café. Euronews was showing footage of refugees protesting outside the closed Horgoš border crossing between Serbia and Hungary.

“Are you ready?” I asked him. “They’ll be with us in a day. Two at most.”

I waited for his answer.

“Oh come on,” he said. “It’s not exactly going to reach us like that.”

I was genuinely afraid.

A country that had once welcomed foreign students and workers with open arms had become a claustrophobic little peripheral state, boasting of its Europeanness as a mark of distinction from the Balkan mud from which, ever since our own war, we had so often declared ourselves eager to escape.

And yet even our membership of the European family had ultimately been linked to promoting “peace and stability in South-East Europe.”

The ghosts of the past still haunted us.

Now there were new ghosts.

New “others.”

⸻

Anas and his friends wanted to reach Berlin.

For many among the million people on the move, Germany was the principal destination.

“Berlin seems like an incredibly creative place for an artist,” Anas told me, almost dreamily. “Like a London you can still get into.”

I listened to the elemental enthusiasm of young people who seemed to have nothing left to lose and everything still to gain.

Then he continued:

“My message to Europeans is simple.

“Syria is in complete chaos. We are in the worst situation since the Second World War. It is no longer a place for us — musicians, artists, doctors, engineers, farmers.

“Leaving happened as a normal human action.

“As I said, people want to find a place where they can be active, where they can survive.

“Life is not sitting in refugee camps, waiting for something to happen when nothing ever does. Not being allowed to work. Watching your children not go to school.

“We are not coming here to take your bread.

“We are simply human beings trying to find a space in which we can act as human beings.”

I listened to him and realised that I, too, had to act.

The least I could do was give them a voice.

Amid the sea of people arriving, depersonalisation and dehumanisation seemed to me the greatest danger.

While they waited to move on, as borders were already beginning to close and the “flows” were being “controlled,” I organised the first Khebez Dawle concert on European Union soil.

I used contacts, the power of the media and social networks to make a simple point: the people passing beside us, the people we were meeting, the people whose hands we had shaken, were exactly that.

People.

I was also thinking one step ahead.

At some point the river of moving human beings would have to stop. Things would change.

Back in May 2015, the European Commission had proposed its system of refugee quotas. Most countries had committed themselves to taking in a certain number.

After the emergency phase, the people who remained or arrived would become our neighbours.

We would live with them.

Work with them.

Socialise with them.

The atmosphere we created in the country, I believed, had to be one of welcome.

The ideal place from which to send that message was the Croatian provinces: neglected, demographically depleted.

We chose Kutina, a town where Croatia’s first reception centre for asylum seekers had been established years earlier.

A local youth association called Koma, an open-minded mayor, NGOs working with refugees, actors, singers, comic-book artists, graffiti artists, journalists, citizens from Zagreb and Kutina — the response was astonishing.

Instruments were brought in.

A sound system.

Local bands wanted to contribute.

The concert was held in the sports hall of Vladimir Vidrić Primary School.

At the entrance to the school was a plaque:

THIS IS A ZERO-TOLERANCE ZONE FOR VIOLENCE.

Television crews arrived in numbers.

Schoolchildren drew pictures and wrote messages of support for refugees.

A project called Taste of Home, in which refugees cooked the food of their countries, prepared lunch for everyone.

I was drenched in sweat all day.

I was nervous.

I ran from one place to another, checking whether everything was “under control.”

That morning, as we drove from Zagreb to Kutina, Anas looked out at the fields on the right-hand side of the motorway.

“They extract oil here too?” he said, surprised. “Unbelievable.”

We also passed Ježevo, the detention centre for irregular migrants awaiting deportation, hidden behind a thick white wall topped with coils of barbed wire.

Soon everyone had entered the hall.

Anas, Hekmat, Louay, Simon and Mohammed picked up their instruments.

With them was Talal, their friend from Damascus who had studied in Zagreb.

He stood behind the microphone.

It was their first performance in a year.

“This is Khebez Dawle,” Talal announced. “Their name means the People’s Bread. They came from Syria. Thank you for welcoming them.

“Before the concert begins, I ask you to honour everyone who has died in the Syrian war.”

The minute of silence lasted a year.

Heads bowed.

Everyone stood motionless.

The hall was full.

In the front row sat children.

Behind them, their parents — the people who put bread on their tables every day.

The silence dissolved into a quiet cry.

Then the cry grew louder.

The drums struck.

A guitar wailed.

The bass came in.

The keyboards followed.

Song after song, everyone remained standing.

Tears ran down faces.

Anas released everything he had inside him.

Khebez Dawle’s songs mixed with a few additions, one of them Bob Marley’s War.

Parents cried.

Tears streamed down the cheeks of activists, actors, singers, comic artists, graffiti artists, journalists, the mayor, people from Zagreb and Kutina.

Nothing else existed.

Only that moment.

A moment petrified in memory.

“We were completely overwhelmed,” Anas told me later.

“These are the things that happen once in a lifetime.

“They cannot be repeated.

“That is the beauty of a moment.”

⸻

News of the Syrian band spread quickly.

Within days, another concert was organised for them at a popular Zagreb club, then another.

Foreign media began writing about Khebez Dawle.

But Anas and his friends wanted to continue.

They waited in Zagreb.

By then dozens of enthusiastic activists were offering to help them.

After several failed attempts to cross the border, the musicians realised that enthusiasm did not necessarily amount to real or serious assistance.

We talked.

The only legal route available to them, and the one they eventually took, led through Hungary.

By then we had organised a support network along the way so that we could constantly know where they were and whether each crossing was going smoothly.

One early autumn afternoon, they boarded a train for Koprivnica at Zagreb’s Central Station.

My friends met them there.

They reported to the police and waited to be transferred onto a train to Hungary.

At the police station, the officers on duty brought a cake for Louay, the guitarist, who was celebrating his birthday that evening.

And then they left.

They crossed into Hungary on the last train.

A few days later, a selfie arrived, taken in front of the Brandenburg Gate.

Along with the photograph was a message:

“Sister, we crossed fallen walls to reach another fallen wall.”

I was enormously happy for them.

And sad.

During our short but intense time together, Anas had come to feel like the younger brother I had never had.

And now, almost as soon as we had met, he was far away again.

⸻

Soon afterwards, I travelled to Brussels.

An emergency summit had been called between the European Union and the countries along the so-called Western Balkan route.

Germany and the European Commission wanted to “bring the savages to their senses” at the edge of the continent: reconcile local rivalries, systematise the movement of people, slow it down, stop it, establish rules.

In Germany and Austria, the political right was gaining strength.

The cry of “Refugees Welcome” was soon replaced by the language of “managing illegal migration.”

Jean-Claude Juncker and Angela Merkel were confronted by the prime ministers of Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, Hungary and Greece.

The meeting continued late into the night.

It was the beginning of the end of a particular moment in history — a moment that had shown that solidarity was necessary and important, but that, ultimately, within a system that had to preserve itself, solidarity could never be complete.

Behind closed doors, they all argued, or so we were told.

In the press room we received the seating plan and the dinner menu.

Somewhere between the fish mousse and the mandarin cake, between napkins and silver cutlery, one could understand that although everyone around that table was a prime minister, and although some belonged to the same European club of states, not everyone seated there was equal.

In the lobby of the Berlaymont, headquarters of the European Commission, a plaque stood inside a glass case.

The Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the European Union only a few years earlier.

Eventually the leaders emerged to face the journalists with a joint statement.

Border crossings would be systematised.

People would be registered according to the rules, including fingerprinting.

A Frontex mission would be deployed to the Greek-Macedonian border.

Countries south of Austria were promised that they would not become Europe’s refugee enclaves and that the Union would provide financial assistance for the people stranded there.

Soon Angela Merkel travelled to Ankara.

She sat beside Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in a golden armchair.

The European Union struck a deal with Turkey.

More European millions would be transferred to Ankara so that Erdoğan would keep millions of people in his own backyard.

A year later, an attempted military coup took place in Turkey.

Erdoğan survived it, changed the constitution and strengthened the powers of the presidency.

The constant conflict with Brussels and Berlin over Turkey’s EU membership culminated in a clear message from European Commission president Juncker in his September 2017 State of the Union address: there could be no European future for Turkey while it blackmailed Brussels and violated human rights at home.

The 2015 Western Balkan route summit marked the beginning of a new cycle of sweeping things under the carpet — of keeping the problem beyond the range of European eyes.

Borders were fortified.

Security alliances strengthened.

Money poured into police and military cooperation.

In some places, pockets of people became trapped along the route.

Fathers without the children who had made it through.

Children without the mothers left behind.

Refugees disappeared from the front pages.

On the ground they remained the concern of the handful of activists and journalists who continued to follow them systematically, telling the story of the hypocrisy.

Dangerous irregular crossings did not stop.

Children continued to die beneath the wheels of trains.

The Greek island of Lesbos in the Aegean — symbol of the first arrival on European soil — became one of Greece’s nightmares.

Its inhabitants, unlike the European Union, did not receive the Nobel Prize, although they too had been nominated.

People kept arriving, but there was nowhere left to put them.

In the summer of 2016, Pope Francis travelled there together with the Ecumenical Patriarch and the Archbishop of Athens, pleading for solidarity and calling on Europe’s clergy to help.

On his return, Francis took one Syrian family with him to the Vatican as a gesture and an example.

Meanwhile, the European Union reached an agreement with the Afghan authorities on deportations, because Afghanistan, they said, was safe.

Planes left Germany every day, returning people to Kabul.

Angela Merkel authorised a pause in those flights for only a few days after a terrorist attack in the Afghan capital in May 2017 killed more than 150 people and injured around 450.

The suicide of an eleven-year-old Syrian boy who had been caring alone for his four younger brothers and sisters in an Austrian reception centre provoked no public cry, no outrage, no meaningful demand for help.

In Austria it did not even make the front pages.

At the time, a post-election coalition was being formed.

The radical right was strong.

It became the coalition partner of the young conservative chancellor Sebastian Kurz.

Angela Merkel had political problems of her own.

The far-right AfD had entered the federal parliament.

The chancellor had failed to assemble the so-called Jamaica coalition with the Greens and the liberals.

On the day the collapse of those negotiations was announced, I landed in Berlin.

Some newspapers carried a photomontage on their front pages: the German chancellor’s head, submerged in water up to her neck.

The country with one of the oldest populations in the world, the country that had first opened its doors to refugees and migrants, now found itself on the front line of the struggle with the consequences of globalisation.

Mother Merkel was paying the price.

⸻

I arrived at Schönhauser Allee station in Prenzlauer Berg.

Anas was standing on the platform.

We hugged tightly.

It was not the first time we had seen each other since his departure for Germany, but by now things had settled somewhat, and much had happened.

We talked for a long time.

He was troubled by the story of his family, refugees on the other side of the world.

His father wanted to return to Syria.

“Whatever the situation is, I can’t live like this anymore. I want to go home,” his father told him.

Anas himself had received a scholarship to an art school in Berlin and was playing music.

Khebez Dawle had meanwhile broken up, even though after arriving in Germany they had completed a successful tour, played for thousands of people and even appeared at the Berlinale film festival.

Anas had finally reached the city of his dreams — “the London you can still get into,” as he had once called it.

But he was despondent.

Once he stopped running, everything caught up with him.

Because of our friendship, I cannot tell every detail.

But it was not easy.

That evening, though, we laughed a lot.

We were furious with the whole world.

Then we laughed again.

One day, he told me, his university mentor had taken the students to one of Berlin’s largest contemporary art galleries.

“Here you are. Look at the installations, walk around. Your assignment is to write an essay about the exhibit you find most interesting.”

That was how Anas remembered the instructions.

He entered the enormous space.

One gallery room followed another.

In the centre of each stood a work of art.

There was everything from crushed plastic bottles representing a critique of global pollution to a little piece of wood standing alone on the floor of another room several hundred square metres in size.

He could no longer remember what the plank was supposed to represent.

“Each one of those rooms, every single exhibit, was watched by a security guard,” Anas told me.

“One guard in each enormous room, protecting little pieces of wood and plastic bottles.

“Of course, when you get too close to an exhibit, the guard comes over and warns you not to touch.”

Instead of looking at the exhibits, Anas began looking at the guards.

They had different skin colours. They were of different heights, weights and ages.

This was their permanent employment. They were paid salaries.

“It felt as if I were looking at the most perfect representation of the model I was now living inside.

“Artists receive money from funds. Guards are paid to protect installations about the state of the world. The guards themselves are hired according to models of ‘diversity and inclusion.’

“That is how the system functions.”

In the end, Anas submitted an essay about the exhibit he had found most interesting.

The security guards.

He wrote about the system and about art, but also about the money spent on that gallery — money that, in his mind, could have housed and educated dozens of Syrian children.

“I got a good grade. My mentor understood what I was trying to say.

“But I understood something too.

“This is simply how it is.

“And perhaps no one will ever fully understand what made something switch inside me at that moment, what I have been through in my life, however hard they try.

“Maybe I should just surrender to the system?”

We laughed again.

And eventually we said another difficult goodbye.

Until next time.

⸻

The media were talking about the final phase of the war in Syria.

ISIS, they said, had been defeated.

Assad was alive, well and still officially in power.

At various rounds of peace negotiations — from Geneva to Kazakhstan to Riyadh — the Syrian opposition rejected a United Nations proposal for a transitional period that would lead to a peaceful political transition.

They did not want Assad in any configuration.

Fighting continued.

Militias on the ground were supported variously by Russia and Iran, by Iraq and Lebanon, depending on whether they fought for Assad or against him.

American, French and Russian bombs fell from the sky on the remaining strongholds of Islamic State.

The Kurds, whose ground forces had served as Western allies and who had hoped for some form of autonomy, perhaps even full sovereignty, could no longer count on that hope so easily.

No good news was coming out of Syria.

Ghouta remained a pocket of rebellion, the one closest to the regime in Damascus since the beginning of the war.

The siege of the city and surrounding region by Assad’s forces was long, harsh and brutal.

In 2013, according to the opposition, sarin nerve gas was used there.

Images of starving children in Ghouta, published several times, eventually opened the way for a humanitarian convoy to enter.

But that was all.

A small attempt at help.

Ghouta, like so many other parts of Syria, had been utterly destroyed.

No electricity.

No water.

No medicine.

No food.

Amnesty International condemned the Assad regime’s strategy as one of “surrender or starve.”

Then came the story from Ghouta of a mother who brought her malnourished child to a doctor.

The child was a living corpse: tiny skeletal arms and legs, eyes wild with hunger.

During the years of siege, the doctor had seen many children like this.

Inside a ruined clinic without equipment, he did what he could.

But the story that mother told him one morning in the late autumn of 2017 left even him speechless.

Before bed, she said, she fed that child and her three other children scraps of newspaper soaked in water.

So that their cries of hunger would stop during the night.

Eastern Ghouta, the region bordering Damascus, had once been the capital’s granary.

Ghouta is our breadbasket, people used to say.

The bread of a society is its people.

Khebez Dawle.

And those who made it all the way to us.

They are Europe’s fresh bread.

I am from the Chernobyl generation. After the catastrophe, I dreamed for a long time, that one day, I will have a child with three heads. The real, palpable fear developed after days of listening to my parents, TV and radio reports on what radiation might do to a body or to a future humanity. Just couple of years post-Chernobyl, when I was a teenager in full bloom, there came our own war. No warning. One Sunday, two planes flew over my balcony and couple of seconds later I heard air raid for the first time in my life. In days and years that followed, I learned of another fear and how to adapt. The way late childhood organized itself around the simple sound that ment - go, now!

When I arrived in Hiroshima for the first time in my life, this May, I thought I was prepared. My whole professional career, I worked as a foreign affairs correspondent, and besides my own personal trauma and dealing with it, during the years of traveling around the world, I have seen many people’s suffering, developed empathy, understood other people’s viewpoints, motives and cultures. But, all those years I could never understand how people can do worst things to other people. As said, I thought I was prepared and I did not arrive as a tourist, or a person encountering the unthinkable for the first time in life. But, you are unprepared for Hiroshima.

Oh, Children!

The Peace Memorial Park is deceptively gentle. Wide lawns, the river on both sides, the shell of the Atomic Bomb Dome standing exactly as ruin, not restored, the way a scar is kept. From one perspective you can see it through the field of roses. The Museum, does to you something else, but also devastating for the soul. There’s a whole history of Hiroshima, the chronology of the days before and after. Normal life of a place, and then, with no warning, no air raid, a watch stopped at 8:15. A stone step with a shadow burned into it where a person once sat.

And then there was she. Sadako Sasaki, arms raised, a crane rising from her hands. Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes was one of my favorite books as a child. She is now standing in front of me, on the top of Children’s Peace Monument in Hiroshima.

“I will write peace on your wings and you will fly all over the world”.

In front her statue, groups of school children gather. I hide in between glass shelves full of paper cranes children leave. They stand in silence, in their school uniforms. Bow their heads. Every now and then one stands in front of the group and recites something. I don’t understand Japanese, but the whole scene makes me deeply sad and tears just start rolling down. Grief comes out loud, when it has nowhere else to go.
Generations live with this horror in their minds. You feel it deeply and profoundly. From humble gestures of kids standing in front of the monument, Sadako’s hands that reach for the sky, the silence that is so loud and thousands of paper cranes in different colors standing as a silent prayer that cannot help anyone, who is talking about peace, still today.

Oppenheimer memory

And then, there in Hiroshima, I suddenly had a flashback. A year earlier, in Croatia, I had met Charles Oppenheimer, J. Robert Oppenheimer’s grandson, who advocates for civilian nuclear energy and for a different understanding of the nuclear future. At the time, the encounter had felt fascinating, almost historically improbable. But standing in Hiroshima, it returned with an entirely different weight.

There was something disorienting in remembering that conversation in the city upon which the first atomic bomb was dropped: the grandson of the man who helped create the weapon, now arguing for nuclear energy as part of humanity’s future. History rarely offers clean lines of guilt, inheritance or redemption. It leaves us instead with contradictions, between destruction and progress, memory and necessity, the shadow of what was created and the hope that the same knowledge might be used differently. Hope is often - shit.

Nuclear times

Hiroshima also hosts a G7 Peace Memorial pavilion, a diplomatic footnote to the tourism of grief, a place where the abstractions of nonproliferation policy are meant to touch ground. On May 19th 2023. Leaders issued G7 Leaders’ Hiroshima Vision on Nuclear Disarmament. Document begins with these words:

“We, the Leaders of the G7, met at a historical juncture in Hiroshima, which together with Nagasaki offers a reminder of the unprecedented devastation and immense human suffering the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki experienced as a result of the atomic bombings of 1945. In a solemn and reflective moment, we reaffirm, in this first G7 Leaders’ document with a particular focus on nuclear disarmament, our commitment to achieving a world without nuclear weapons with undiminished security for all.”

More than a year after Russia’s full scale aggression of Ukraine, message was clear - they underscored the importance of the 77-year record of non-use of nuclear weapons, saying Russia’s irresponsible nuclear rhetoric and undermining of arms control regimes, are dangerous and unacceptable.

But, with all the things happening around the world today, we are living through the collapse of the very architecture that was supposed to prevent Hiroshima from happening twice. New START, the last binding treaty limiting American and Russian strategic arsenals expired on 5 February 2026, and no successor was in place. UN Secretary-General António Guterres called it a “grave moment” for international peace and security, warning that for the first time in more than half a century, the world faces no binding limits on the strategic nuclear arsenals of the two states that hold nearly ninety percent of the planet’s nuclear weapons. The only legally binding mechanism left to restrain nuclear weapons globally is now the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

And into that vacuum steps a set of dynamics that should frighten anyone who has stood, as I have, in front of Sadako’s statue. Japan itself, the only nation to have suffered nuclear attack, whose entire postwar identity was built on the three non-nuclear principles, is now debating whether to abandon that identity. Some American strategists see friendly proliferation by allies as an acceptable cost of reducing the U.S. role in the region. Japan’s own prime minister has hinted at revisiting the non-nuclear principles, and a defense minister has openly called for debate on the nuclear question, even as Japan sits surrounded by three nuclear-armed revisionist powers -China, Russia, and North Korea - each enhancing their arsenals. Layer onto this a war grinding on in Iran, a Russia that has made nuclear threat a rhetorical reflex rather than an exception, and a China that has shown no willingness to join any trilateral arms control framework in the future.

In my second book, Nesigurni (published jus in Croatian, translated roughly as The Insecure(d) / The Unsecure(d)), there is a chapter called The Bomb, about a kind of permanent latent threat underneath the surface of European life, invoked and withdrawn at will, never fully present but never absent either. The bomb as rhetorical instrument, not something one intends to use, but something that is always visible, at the edge of the conversation, as leverage, or precisely the doctrine we are now watching consolidate itself as normal.

An Old Man and a Crane

In the Hiroshima G7 pavillion there is a table at which leaders sat during the meeting, their messages, speeches and photos from the summit. An old man who works there as a volunteer guide approached me. His English was almost nonexistent. We stood there gesturing, until he gestured the thing I understood - asking me where I was from. I said - Croatia. Nothing. Then I typed it into Google Translate. He read it in Japanese, and his whole face opened into that long, rising “oooooooh”, kind of the particular Japanese sound of wonder and recognition, half exclamation, half sigh. Don’t know what that ment. Bu then he reached into a small bag and gave me a paper crane. He then showed me a photograph on his phone- there was him with Joe Biden. He was giving cranes to whoever passed through, a head of state, a stranger like me, it did not matter. The crane is offered as a kind of civic liturgy, repeated daily, to anyone willing to receive it. I understood, holding it, that this is what Hiroshima has built instead of bitterness: a discipline of memory performed by ordinary people, indefinitely.

Sore Throat

A text message arrived from a friend who was preparing to move to Japan as a diplomat. She knows the place. “You should try oysters and champagne with orange juice,” she wrote me.

My throat was sore. Less from the heat, more from the crying, and simply from holding back words I didn’t yet have. Grief, I’ve noticed long time ago, often settles first in the throat.

Hiroshima’s oyster farming spans roughly 450 years, originating in the 16th century during the Muromachi period. Today, the region produces about 60% of Japan’s total oyster supply. The calm, nutrient-rich waters of Hiroshima Bay provide ideal conditions for the rich flavor and plump size that made these shellfish famous. Hiroshima Prefecture is also a top grower of citrus fruits in Japan, famous for sweet Etajima mandarin oranges and the birth of unique Hassaku orange.

I crossed the bridge off the Peace Memorial island and there was a restaurant. I ordered. Everyone was having the same. There was life before the bomb. And there is after. Or we should always hope.

An Unreal Room

A few days later, in Tokyo, at the Okura Hotel, I was sitting in the first row listening to a Nobel Peace Prize laureate speak. Nihon Hidankyo, the organization of “hibakusha”, the atomic bomb survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2024 for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again. Nagasaki survivor Terumi Tanaka, who was thirteen years old when the bomb fell, who found his aunt’s charred body and that of her grandson in the ruins, said something that has not left me since: “The world is not meant to be a prison in which we await collective annihilation”.

Sitting in that room, listening to his testimony and message to the future generations felt unreal, as though reality itself had thinned for an hour, and what remained underneath it was somehow more true than anything that we are living in the world today…

On this same date on which the first ever atomic bomb was thrown eighty-one years ago, we have entered another era in which nuclear weapons are once again being used as communication, constantly gestured toward, referenced, dangled. We should not accept this. As all these years later Hiroshima does not ask you to feel guilty. It asks you to feel responsible, which is a much harder and more active thing.

(“They make advertisements for soap. Why not for peace?”, Hiroshima Mon Amour)

After an operation of lung cancer in which half of my lungs were removed, I became kind of human meteorological unit. Humidity of last couple of summers makes my every breath feel negotiated. Summers are, not just for me, becoming a risk. At some point in my life, summer was - sunlight, the sea, the season in which the body felt most free.

When I was young, nobody told us to hide from the sun. We were advised to go outside because sunlight was good for us, because we needed vitamin D. The sea and the air would make us stronger, grandmas used to tell us. Summer was considered a cure, not a threat.

We would spend hours in the plićak, the warm shallows of Adriatic Sea, eating peaches so soft that the juice ran down our arms straight into water. The sweetness of the fruit mixed with the salt on our fingers and lips. It is still one of the most precise tastes of summer I remember: a ripe peach, seawater and skin warmed by the sun and the breeze of the wind.

Food was a big part of the summer geography. Mussels cooked in a dark stew that demanded bread for the sauce. Fish pulled directly from the sea and placed on the grill. Salted sardines, still my favourite, their flavour goes straight to your brain, as if the entire salt of the Adriatic had been compressed into one small silver body pressed in a big tin can with a huge rock.

In summers of our childhood, these were not culinary experiences designed for Instagram photos. They were simply - lunch.

Summer holidays were not yet an “experience economy.” They were not a competition for the most beautiful table, the most isolated bay or the most expensive sunbed with a cocktail.

For a lot of people from my generation, the summer holiday was one of the continent’s great democratic promises. For a few weeks, ordinary life could be suspended. Workers, teachers, families and pensioners could inhabit the same coastline. The sea did not ask what you did for a living before allowing you to enter it.

Summer was not luxury. Summer was just the time. When the living was easy.

We understood the feeling. Summer seemed to exist outside history. Governments changed. Countries collapsed. Wars began and ended. Yet every year the cicadas returned, the shutters opened, and someone carried a bowl of peaches towards the water.

Our part of the Mediterranean gave us the illusion of permanence. But that illusion is ending.

The Mediterranean region is warming about 20 per cent faster than the global average. Europe as a whole is now the fastest-warming continent, heating at more than twice the global rate. In 2025, record heatwaves stretched from the Mediterranean to the Arctic, while the seas surrounding Europe reached their highest average surface temperature on record for the fourth consecutive year.

The first half of 2025 was the warmest first half-year ever recorded for the Mediterranean Sea. Almost half of the basin was at least one degree Celsius warmer than the long-term average.

Scientists from the Ruđer Bošković Institute (RBI), as part of an international research effort, have analyzed data collected in the South Adriatic Pit, the deepest part of the Adriatic Sea, and obtained results showing that deep waters are warming and becoming saltier at a rate several times faster than climate projections. This means that changes expected only by the end of the century are already happening today, with serious consequences for ecosystems, the climate, and coastal communities.

Alarms lighted by the science goes almost unnoticed, while the summers show more and more invasive species in our waters, less and less sardines on our tables. To think about the cultures that make Mediterranean as it once was, from olives to grapes, we need to read this and other data. And adapt. This July, heat, drought and wildfires have again forced evacuations across parts of southern Europe. Temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius have coincided with major fires in Spain and elsewhere around the Mediterranean. The overall mathematics of summer include grids, electricity, food, water, waste, the whole infrastructure and ecosystem. It includes deep and long-term understanding and thinking.

Stone houses that can no longer cool down, seas so warm that entering the water brings no relief, elderly people trapped inside apartments, exhausted workers serving tourists in temperatures their bodies were never designed to withstand, and firefighters confronting landscapes that have become fuel by itself. The summer holiday and the climate emergency now occupy the same postcard. Or the same photograph. As seen on the one with which I illustrated this Stack, from an AFP photographer during fires in France.

First row apocalypse tourism. Like there’s no tomorrow. Like it doesn’t affect them.

My body knows what political debates still try to postpone.

Climate change is still presented as something that will happen later - to future generations, future coastlines or future economies. But the future has already entered our lungs and our daily calculations. It determines whether we can walk at noon, whether children can play outside and whether people with damaged lungs, heart conditions or other vulnerabilities can safely leave the house. No AI can persuade us it’s the other way around.

For someone with half her lungs, there is nothing abstract about this change.

I do not need a chart to tell me that the Mediterranean climate is changing. My body has become the chart.

At the same time, the summer holiday is becoming economically unrecognisable. Prices rise with the temperature. Places once built around modest family holidays are increasingly organised around extraction: how much can be charged for a room, a parking space, a chair, a plate of fish, a view?

The summer holiday has therefore become a strange combination of privilege and endurance. We save for months to travel into extreme heat. We pay inflated prices to sit beneath umbrellas protecting us from the reason we came. We photograph sunsets through smoke from distant fires. We turn on air conditioning so that we can survive the climate we flew or drove hundreds of kilometres to experience.

We continue performing the old rituals because we do not know what should replace them.

There is a line long attributed to Isak Dinesen: “The cure for anything is salt water- sweat, tears or the sea.”

Salt water was our answer to everything. We sweated because the day was hot. We cried because life was difficult. Then we entered the sea and believed ourselves restored. But what happens when the sweat becomes dangerous, the tears are for landscapes we are losing and the sea itself is feverish and killing its own species with our help?

The phrase remains beautiful, but the Mediterranean cannot cure what we are doing to the Mediterranean.

Perhaps the real loss is not simply that summers have become hotter or more expensive. It is that we can no longer trust them. The season that represented release now requires vigilance. Check the fire map. Check the heat warning. Check the humidity. Check whether there is water. Check whether your elderly parents are answering the phone.

Summer used to mean abandoning the clock. Now it means monitoring alerts.

Loving the Mediterranean can no longer mean consuming it as though it were inexhaustible. It must mean changing when and how we travel, protecting public access to the coast, creating shade in towns, adapting working hours, defending water as a common good and refusing an economy that treats every centimetre of the shoreline as a product.

It must also mean accepting that nostalgia is not a climate policy.

The summers of our youth will not return simply because we remember them beautifully. The sunlight that once appeared innocent now carries a warning. The sea that seemed eternal is warming. The body that once ran into the water without hesitation now stops, measures the air and tries to breathe.

I am still here. The sea is still here. But neither of us is unchanged.

Our survival may now depend on learning when to step out of it and how to preserve enough of the old summer that future children might still know the taste of a peach, saltwater and freedom.

A film that starts with Travis Scott, as a bard reciting a poem about the triumph of lost King of Ithaca sets the scene itself.

Nolan’s Odyssey, for me, is a cry for what little is left of humanity, which us, humans, are destroying. Shall we rise again, after the death of another civilisation, forgetting our mistakes? Are we presenting another Trojan horse to our enemies that will also destroy us? Is it AI, another war, drone and massacre after which we will no longer know who we are?

Nostos, the homecoming is here with us, not as longing for home, something lost, that you grieving to return to, only to find something else, but nostos as the only possible place and state of mind in which, and from which you can make peace with what was, with yourself, and accept a possible end of the world.

Damon and Hathaway are so brilliant in this movie it is difficult to describe. The scene of their reunion, his reflection on the Trojan War and the decapitation of Athena will enter the history of cinema.

Another one is the Underworld scene with Sinon, Agamemnon, and Tiresias. Eliot Page miniature, and the consciousness of conscience, moral responsibility that awakens is something to put you in awe.

A miniature of Samantha Morton as Circe, can also be transferred to our present age dilemmas and her deep performance is scary.

So, while we always search for the home, something that’s lost, while we reconcile with ourselves and the world, the question that stays with us today is should we just wait for the Sea People, as a cause of our anxiety who are, at the end, to be blamed for the collapse of the interconnected world? As it was in the Bronze Age?

Or should we understand that the one thing we can do, while things fall apart, is much-needed search for ourselves. Both within ourselves, but also within our groups and societies, looking for the few good men and women left, resisting, understanding what’s at stake, or closely watching the signs along the way, at least to be deeply aware of the gravity of evil and our deeds in it.

The chaos of the collapse of every civilization and the possibility of finding ourselves as human beings after it. In some other shape, but with a heart that still beats. While there are still humans around, not just monsters.

Brilliant movie.

Yesterday, my friend Vladimir Arsenijević was beaten in Belgrade.

He was attacked beneath Branko’s Bridge as he arrived to help prepare a public commemoration for the victims of the Srebrenica genocide. A group of around two dozen men hit him in the head, kicked him, threatened him... The space around him had been marked with messages glorifying war criminal Ratko Mladić.

Vladimir was not attacked because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In a society in which the political and cultural right has spent decades relativising, denying or openly celebrating the crimes of the 1990s, the simple act of acknowledging established historical and judicial truth has become an act of physical courage.

When I wrote to him after the attack, Vladimir replied that this was “expected here.”

That sentence stayed with me.

Expected.

To be beaten for remembering the dead. Expected.

To be surrounded by twenty or thirty men and attacked in the centre of a European capital for defending a truth confirmed by international courts. Expected.

There is something devastating in the calmness of that expectation. It reveals more about the state of a country than any European Commission report, accession chapter or diplomatic statement ever could.

Vladimir is a writer, cultural activist and former Europe’s Futures Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, as I am. His work through KROKODIL has created spaces for literature, dialogue and cultural cooperation in a region in which words have too often been conscripted into the service of nationalism.

He is also a friend and a very nice human being.

In 2018, he hosted the promotion of my book at the KROKODIL Centre in Belgrade, under that same bridge. I remember the warmth of that evening and the generosity with which he opened the space which was, for many other coming there, an independent, intellectually alive, unafraid of complexity and uninterested in the crude ethnic categories through which nationalists continue to organise our lives.

Such places are fragile because they represent the opposite of authoritarian culture.

They offer conversation where power demands obedience. They preserve memory where others demands amnesia or disagreement without dehumanisation. That is precisely why they are targeted.

I reported from Belgrade during a period when the country was supposedly leaving the wars of the 1990s behind and moving towards Europe. I covered political assassinations, elections, Kosovo, war-crimes trials, democratic promises and nationalist returns. I listened to countless discussions about Serbia’s European future.

Throughout those years, the denial of the Srebrenica genocide remained a harsh and persistent reminder of the true state of Serbian society.

It was the point at which the language of democratic transition often collapsed.

Politicians could speak about reforms, investment, modernisation and European integration. Yet when the conversation reached Srebrenica, a wall descended. The facts became “interpretations.” Court judgments became “opinions.” Victims became numbers to be negotiated. Responsibility was dissolved into endless discussions about what others had done.

This was never simply a disagreement about terminology. It tells society that no final moral boundary was crossed. It converts convicted war criminals into national heroes and those who insist on truth into traitors. Once that logic takes hold, violence is never far away.

The International Court of Justice established that genocide was committed in Srebrenica and found that Serbia had violated its obligation to prevent it. The United Nations has designated 11 July as the International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica. These are not partisan positions or anti-Serbian inventions. They are part of the international legal and historical record. And yet, thirty-one years later, a Serbian writer can be beaten for preparing a commemoration of its victims.

It would be comforting for Europeans to regard this as a Serbian problem, another expression of an unfinished Balkan past.

That would be a serious mistake.

The attack on Vladimir belongs to the political condition of Europe today.

Across the continent, the far right has learned that it can move steadily from words to intimidation and from intimidation to physical violence. Historical revisionism is no longer confined to obscure extremist groups. It enters parliaments, television studios and government coalitions. Political leaders test how much hatred can be normalised before institutions react.

Too often, they discover that the answer is: quite a lot.

Street violence does not appear from nowhere. On a continent defined between bureaucracy and wilderness of social media, cognitive warfare and people subjecting themselves freely and via alghoritmic influence to authoritarian tendencies, this is the most important question. Values. As before kicks come a podcast, before the mob comes the political message that some citizens are enemies, some memories are treason and truths are attacks on the nation.

The men under Branko’s Bridge did not invent the moral climate in which they acted.

The European Commission has already warned that restrictions on freedom of association, assembly and expression have increased in Serbia and that the country must urgently reverse its backsliding on freedom of expression. But European policy towards Serbia has too often treated democracy and the rule of law as secondary matters - important in reports, negotiable in practice.

For years, the European Union has presented enlargement as a transformative process. Yet transformation cannot consist only of infrastructure projects, trade agreements, security arrangements and diplomatic management.

Europe is first and foremost a value system. Without it is nothing. That is why so many are trying to dismantle it, and are, unfortunately, succeeding. The defence of Europe does not begin only at summits, external borders or in speeches about strategic autonomy. It begins in places such as the space beneath Branko’s Bridge. It begins when a writer kneels to clean away the filth before people gather to remember the dead.

There is also a tendency to describe people such as Vladimir as courageous. He is. But there is also something deeply wrong in a society in which ordinary decency requires exceptional courage. We must refuse that normalisation. We must not allow “expected” to become another word for acceptable.

So, today, I’m asking European intellectuals, journalist, scientists, to answer me, is a Europe in which writers are beaten for commemorating genocide, their Europe? A continent prepared to accommodate street violence, organised intimidation, impunity and contempt for the rule of law?

It is not mine.

“Yeah, it’s July — but it’ll never be July 2025 again.”

I saw this line this morning, beneath an Instagram video from Oasis’s first homecoming show in Manchester last summer. Much in life does not come round twice. This summer, Oasis’s “Wonderwall” has followed England’s footballers from the stands at the World Cup, becoming once again a song for collective hope. And Andy Burnham , then the mayor of Greater Manchester, who, after Oasis’s Manchester run, took a Jet2 Holidays break in Dubrovnik, has since become the man most widely expected to be Britain’s next prime minister.

Time moves on. But I thought it would be nice to republish the English version of my story from July 2025, originally published in Croatian by Telegram, from Oasis’s first historic return to their hometown of Manchester, in Heaton Park.

AI translated. After all, you’re my wonderwall…

We witnessed history: that was the shared verdict of everyone who gathered in Manchester’s Heaton Park on Friday, 11 July. Oasis had begun their first tour in fifteen years with two shows in Cardiff, but the Gallagher brothers’ return to their hometown was the symbolic moment. The importance of that day in Manchester was almost tangible.

Every corner was adorned with at least one photograph of the band or a sign echoing the Oasis logo; directions to the concert site appeared on every lamppost, and Oasis songs blared from every pub and bar. People streamed towards the park in the north of the city. Richard Ashcroft, frontman of Manchester’s own The Verve, provided the ceremonial opening with “Bitter Sweet Symphony”.

Liam and Noel walked onto the stage holding hands. “Hell, Manchester!” shouted the man beside me as pints flew through the air and flares were lit. The force and intensity never dropped for a second, song after song, as though we were witnessing something supernatural rather than a concert. After “Don’t Look Back in Anger” came the embrace between the Gallagher brothers that so many had been waiting years to see.

A comeback that surpassed nostalgia

The boys from Burnage, born into an Irish working-class world; the brothers whose mother Peggy — the central figure in their lives — took them away from their violent father. Liam later said that music first drew him in after a hooligan from a neighbouring school hit him over the head with a hammer.

“This is THE place!” Noel Gallagher shouted from the stage as the sun dipped below the horizon and 80,000 souls, at the first of five concerts in their hometown, sang every song in unison — every word, from beginning to end — until the final notes of “Champagne Supernova” and the fireworks above Manchester.

Committed Manchester City supporters, the brothers dedicated “D’You Know What I Mean?” to a special guest in the crowd: Pep Guardiola, whom they called the greatest manager of all time. The remark prompted boos from part of the audience — United fans, whom Liam later made a point of greeting. There was also an emotional dedication of “Live Forever” to the late Liverpool footballer Diogo Jota. Everything that happened and was heard in Heaton Park breathed Manchester, and spoke of Manchester.

A city of workers and musicians

Euphoria swept northern England on an unusually hot day. People came to Manchester from all over the world and poured into a river of personal memories of what this great band had meant to them. Oasis in Manchester was exactly what it had to be. Neither has a story without the other.

At the beginning of the concert, one man climbed a five-metre sign above a bar and remained there for the entire show, singing at the top of his lungs. Elsewhere, a group of ticketless fans tried to break into the concert through a fence on a secluded side of the park. One ran from police chasing the troublemakers and shouted: “You only live once, and this is Oasis, man! OASIS! I’ve waited my whole life for this!”

As I wrote in a column last year, the reunion tour was announced in a time of global escalation, war, insecurity and fratricidal violence on every side. Britain was shaken last summer by racist attacks from the radical right, fuelled by disinformation that Elon Musk was amplifying on his platform. Keir Starmer’s new government was still finding its feet as the first Labour administration after Brexit.

The last great British band

The founders of Oasis embody that rough, working-class, resilient and defiant Manchester: a city in which almost 40 per cent of the population has Irish roots, and where everyone lives and dies for their football club. The reconciliation of the Gallagher brothers seemed, in its own way, to suggest that anything was still possible — even redemption in a world of horrors, even unity in an age of division. For all those who came rushing to Manchester in these twilight times, the Gallaghers’ renewed brotherhood was not merely a trip down memory lane or a hunt for Instagram likes.

“I think this is the most positive thing that has happened to this country in the ten years since Brexit,” Colin White, owner of Vinyl Revival, one of the city’s best-known record shops — now as cultish as Manchester’s music scene itself — tells me. “We have had nothing but bad news, and something like this brings people together. And we have visitors from all over the world. I’ve never seen so many people in Manchester.”

White is friends with the Gallagher brothers. He attended four of their first five Manchester gigs when they began playing in the early 1990s. “I think they are one of the last great bands Britain has produced. No one has emerged since who comes anywhere close.”

A musical pilgrimage

Before the reunion concert, he says, he sold more Oasis albums in one day than he had in the previous year. “The first two albums are flying off the shelves. You can see it in the concert setlist — most of the songs come from them. In truth, those albums are what turned Oasis into an institution.”

Manchester’s streets were flooded with the bucket hats made famous by the Gallagher brothers. There was a chance to make money on every corner. For days, the longest queues had formed along the main shopping street, where official tour merchandise was sold in several branded shops. One department store had signs bearing the brothers’ names above its entrances, counting how many people chose the “Liam” door and how many walked through “Noel”. A Gallagher lookalike competition was held, too.

A Barclays report forecasts that more than 1.5 million fans attending shows across the United Kingdom and Dublin will spend around £1.06 billion. One third of that sum will be spent on the five Manchester concerts. A city of half a million people will see roughly the same number pass through simply because of Oasis, not counting other tourists drawn to Manchester by its musical and sporting history. Noel Gallagher has announced that he will donate much of his earnings to the Teenage Cancer Trust.

The experience economy

Theresa Lindsay, a financial expert, says Oasis are among the city’s most important local exports, so she is not surprised by what is happening. “Our city will generate at least £100 million from these concerts. It proves that music is Manchester’s engine, and that this is an enormous economic event for our community.”

The psychology behind the experience economy is clear. At a time when there is no longer a monoculture, when shared experience has fragmented into micro-worlds and endless content bubbles in the digital sphere, the human desire for connection and meaningful interaction is reasserting itself as a need.

“As we saw with Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, fans are prepared to spend heavily when there is an emotional connection in the story. It is not simply about going to an event,” a Barclays analyst told a local Manchester outlet.

Longing for the 1990s

Lisa is a 23-year-old art student volunteering at Manchester’s summer arts festival, which is taking place alongside the Oasis concerts. We meet beside an installation where passers-by can write their response to one question: What do you want? She tells me she wants to be an artist because, in a world of chaos, art gives meaning.

“When there are no longer words to describe what is happening around us, we need to communicate in another way. Oasis is not the music of my generation, but it is exciting to see that this culture is still alive, and that young people are embracing it too. We miss what you experienced in the 1980s and 1990s. I look at people in Manchester these days and the word that keeps coming to mind is community, because all these people are bringing it back to life together. So this is what I would say to people my age: Fuck the internet, sing the fucking songs and have a pint!”

Those emotional bonds and experiences are not some abstract form of nostalgia in an algorithmic world. They are profoundly tied to this place. Because Manchester is not merely a city — it is an attitude. “Hell upon Earth”, as Friedrich Engels called it in the mid-19th century when, in The Condition of the Working Class in England, he described the inhumane lives of workers whose hands, backs and lungs powered capitalism in the world’s first industrial city, forged in the Victorian age.

From the ruins of industry

That history left a deep mark not only on an urban landscape of red brick, chimneys and canals, but also on the mentality of a working class that was never merely a social category in Manchester: it was the city’s cultural foundation. Tough. Enduring. Defiant. Like the Gallagher brothers.

For my generation, Manchester was not simply a case study from history books or the bleak post-industrial films of British cinema. It was a tangible part of our identity, binding us into a global community — and music was the connective tissue.

Deindustrialisation turned Manchester into an abandoned wilderness people were leaving behind, mired in economic collapse and urban decay. Somewhere amid those ruins, on the wave of punk, in Hulme — a district colloquially known as “Valium City” because, as one British journalist wrote, life there was possible only on tranquillisers — Tony Wilson created the Factory club in the late 1970s. From it emerged an entire new culture.

Manchester reborn

We first knew it as post-punk, through bands such as the legendary Joy Division. Then came The Smiths, followed by The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays and the Haçienda. The monochrome landscape became a rhapsody of colour. The city became MADchester.

It was Manchester’s rebirth. Its turnaround and rebranding as the centre of a global music movement happened through Wilson’s persistence and vision, which earned him the nickname Mr Manchester. Without the feeling of isolation and escapism embedded deep in the character of a failed industrial city, there would have been no emotional complexity, no profound love of community — the foundations on which Wilson built the scene, and from which it itself grew.

A key symbol of the connection between culture and working-class history remains Salford Lads’ Club, a social club established in 1903 for working-class boys. It kept them away from the streets and crime, gave them a place for social activity and laid the foundations for employment. Salford, alongside Manchester itself, forms the other half of Greater Manchester. In 1985, The Smiths put a photograph of the club’s façade on the cover of their legendary album The Queen Is Dead, turning it into a place of pilgrimage for indie fans.

Engels’s dirty ol’ town…

“Today, this is the third most visited site in the history of modern British music, after Abbey Road in London and the Cavern Club in Liverpool,” Leslie Holmes, the club’s guiding spirit, tells me as he shows us through The Smiths’ so-called Memorial Room. It contains thousands of photographs taken outside the club in imitation of Stephen Wright’s original image. “Morrissey’s decision to pose here with The Smiths put us on the global map. We are still here because of that photograph alone.”

The room also contains a mural of Manchester icons: beneath Noel Gallagher stands Friedrich Engels. “He is a very important cultural figure for this city. He came here to run his father’s textile mill, which was in Salford, and ended up writing about the working class. He described Salford as a dirty city. Ewan MacColl, our own man from Salford, took that Engels reference for his song ‘Dirty Old Town’. It became a huge hit, and The Pogues’ version is still an anthem for Salford football club.”

Although thousands of people from all over the world flock to the club, including musicians playing Manchester while on tour, an urban redevelopment plan once proposed demolishing the iconic building. Locals saved it through donations, while Morrissey himself and Graham Nash — a founder of The Hollies, later part of Crosby, Stills & Nash, and a former Salford Lads’ Club member — contributed substantial sums.

The heart of the working class

“We are still among the poorest ten per cent of areas in Britain. These were the Salford docks. When people lost their jobs in the 1960s and 1970s with the collapse of industry, that was that. Most never worked again. Their children today lack motivation too; it is hard to get them moving. In recent years, first Brexit and then Covid destroyed us.”

Holmes shows us the club’s historic rooms and the yearbooks he carefully archived. Material dating back to 1903 is now being digitised, making it possible to trace the life and path of every boy who passed through Salford Lads’ Club.

As Holmes sees us off, preparing to photograph us in front of the building, he says that people often do not know the right angle from which to take the picture. “The important thing is that they capture not only the club’s sign, but the street sign as well.” The club stands on the corner of Coronation Street — immortalised in the longest-running and most watched soap opera of the same name, which depicts working-class life through Salford, where the show’s creator Tony Warren was born and raised.

A clean new city

The link between Coronation Street and Salford Lads’ Club vividly illustrates the intersection of two central forces in local identity: the cultural representation of the working class and the real community that shaped that culture.

Towards the end of that musical and historical journey, Oasis arrived in the mid-1990s: working-class children, lads, Manchester boys who carried all the stories of the “dirty city”, but also a new sound rooted in tradition. Liam Gallagher has always said he would never have become a musician had he not seen The Stone Roses live. Oasis took everything to another level. They became the best-selling band in British history. Though placed within the genre of Britpop, they were pure rock ’n’ roll: a raw sound that made the perfect frame for warm lyrics full of love, encouragement and reassurance for generations of fans.

During Oasis’s musical hibernation, the old dirty Manchester was transformed completely. It became the fastest-growing urban centre in Britain, economically driven by new technology sectors — although creative industries remained at the top.

With the bricks, stories disappear

Manchester is distinguished by its participatory model of governance, and its newly published ten-year strategic plan for 2025 to 2035, written after consultations with residents, focuses on climate resilience, citizen-centred services, building trust, inclusion and safety, but also on positioning the city globally through music and sport.

Yet as you walk through a Manchester that is being demolished and rebuilt, it is hard to escape the sense that accelerated urban transformation, rising property prices and new bricks replacing old ones are erasing some of the stories that made the city. In the central square, an Oasis Fan-Pit has been built, serving eight-pound beer; on the other, unfenced side, at the foot of Queen Victoria’s statue, some of the city’s newer residents are playing football. People who still believe that Britain might offer them a better life.

The day before the Heaton Park concert, I watched a press conference in my hotel featuring the British prime minister and the French president, who was on a multi-day state visit to the United Kingdom. Starmer and Macron announced an agreement aimed at preventing migrants from crossing the Channel, and called on citizens of both countries to be patient in an impatient world.

Tears at the Oasis shrine

At a time of what has been described as the politics of easy answers — the radical right making rapid strides towards power in both Britain and France — the crisis of the national political establishment is reflected differently at the local level. Labour mayors have rebelled against the social spending cuts announced by Starmer’s government, while a new Ipsos survey showed that Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, known as the “King of the North”, is a more popular Labour politician than the prime minister himself.

Many media outlets immediately began speculating about Burnham taking over the party. The reason they point to is his record: from young people moving to Manchester to rising productivity and investment attraction. Can such examples really bridge the inequalities and insecurities that have brought us to this historic moment?

By chance, after the concert we ended up in one of the city’s best-known clubs, run by the other Gallagher brothers, Paul and Mark. Definitely Maybe is a kind of Oasis shrine, where fans came to sing their hearts out before and after the concert, sealing that singular Manchester experience. At around two in the morning, the elder Gallagher was watching footage of the first Heaton Park concert on a large screen in the club’s back room. He stood in complete silence, his eyes full of tears. That image told me everything.

Manchester knows what it is

You can tell the story of a city only when the city itself — through the people who make it and lead it — understands deeply what it is, and the values that define its community. Alongside a clearly articulated urban character, Manchester’s values are inclusion, citizen-centred services and the everyday work carried out within the community and with the community. Only such an open and global identity can draw others in. With Oasis returning to their hometown, hundreds of thousands of people from around the world were able to feel the same thing: Manchester knows what it is.

At the airport, they played with another song from the city’s deep reservoir of musical heritage. The airport’s slogan paraphrases the Bee Gees’ “More Than a Woman”: “More thAn aN airport”, with the letters MAN picked out.

Manchester is, at least for those of us who carry the songs of its — and our shared global — history in our hearts, truly more than a city. And on that day, in a world of hatred, it was our oasis too.

Nine years ago, in the United States, I met one of those people who arrive in your life with the force of immediate recognition. Martina Bugriba, a fellow journalist, my soul sister, a person with a heart of gold. I was travelling through the US when I got sick, properly sick, the kind of sick that makes a foreign country feel suddenly much larger and much less hospitable than it had been the day before. Martina was with me every step of the way.

I still remember, more than the illness itself, a speech she gave, to the group of Americans in charge of our trip, after they got me from the hospital in Denver and flew me to Tampa on the edge of life. At one point she said something like: where we come from, you don’t let your friends go through hard things alone. You show up. You stay. Because it was never optional in the first place.

Martina is from Ghana. We’re still occasionally in touch, not that much I would like to. And there is always something. COVID, other illness, distance, which is never human one, just the one we imagine it to be when we look at the map.

Sisterhood was also forged through other similarities. The one in which we all sometimes feel like “the other”. The one that shows that in our parts of the world care for another person is not a sentiment you feel but a duty you perform. This is the thing that the times around us, crazy times, algorithmically designed times, times that divide, have not fully managed to dissolve in places that the fast version of modernity experienced late, or unevenly.

When I saw that Croatia would play Ghana, I thought of Martina immediately. She is Ghana, for me. And the truth is, as strange as it might sound, Croatia and Ghana were no strangers to each other either, long before this match gave anyone a reason to think about it.

There is a piece of history shared by Ghana and Croatia that is rarely mentioned today, and when it is, it tends to surface only in an ideological register that derails rather than illuminates the conversation. In 1961, the ship Galeb, carrying the Yugoslav president, a Croat, Josip Broz Tito, docked in Accra. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president and one of the central figures of African independence and Pan-Africanism, welcomed him there. Both were founding fathers of the Non-Aligned Movement, part of an era in which newly independent states were trying to carve out political room for themselves between the Cold War’s two blocs not as passive terrain for other people’s geopolitical games, but as actors with their own interests and voices.

Today’s Croatia, an EU and NATO member state, in the world of great fractures, experiences how our continent is struggling to find its strategic autonomy between aggressive Russia, assertive China and a distant America. Croatia might do well to acknowledge that its particular path into contemporary Europe carries something others in the West don’t have: a historical connection to this part of the world that sets it apart from a Western European legacy -a legacy the Kremlin evil propaganda and Chinese expansion in Africa are both, in their own ways, exploiting in the twenty-first century.

For Croatia inside the EU, there is a difference between rejecting the ideology of the past and discarding every diplomatic memory, relationship and political instinct that came bundled with it. Croatia’s anti-Yugoslav reflex too often confuses the two. Anything connected to that history gets reduced too quickly to an identity quarrel, a trench war, a suspicion of nostalgia. A mature Croatian foreign policy should be able to say something simpler: we don’t need to erase the fact that our political and diplomatic space once included relationships with African countries built on something other than moral superiority. Europe’s relationship with Africa is changing, because it has to. Africa is not merely Europe’s southern neighborhood, a source of migration anxiety and humanitarian emergencies. It is one of the decisive geopolitical spaces of this century, a continent of demographic growth, urbanisation, critical minerals, digital markets, energy competition, climate vulnerability, military influence and institutional ambition. Pragmatism is sometimes useful in foreign policy.

Ghana remains one of West Africa’s more durable democracies, which is particularly striking in a region scarred by coups, jihadist spillover and institutional fragility. It is not a country without political tension, patronage networks, corruption or public frustration, but it has kept competitive elections, an active media environment and functioning civic institutions alive in a neighbourhood where many states have faced far darker ruptures.

Economically, Ghana is climbing out of its worst crisis in decades: debt distress, inflation, a weakened currency, real pressure on household incomes. That legacy is still visible, youth unemployment, strained public services, the cost of living, energy-sector debt, an economy still dependent on gold, cocoa and oil. And yet Ghana hosts the Secretariat of the African Continental Free Trade Area, the most ambitious attempt yet to convert Africa’s political size into economic leverage. For European businesses, Ghana is one entry point into a continent trying to build its own single market and negotiate with the rest of the world on less unequal terms. Its location on the Gulf of Guinea places it squarely inside the contest for influence over African security and Europe is increasingly aware that secure sea lines off West Africa are not some remote concern but part of its own economic and security perimeter.

It’s worth saying, too, that when people today are asked to name a Ghanaian, the two names that travel furthest are not politicians or economists but Kofi Annan and Idris Elba, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning UN Secretary-General who embodied a certain idea of global diplomacy, and an actor who has become one of the most recognisable faces in world cinema. It tells you something about how Ghana is seen from the outside: a source of individual brilliance that gets absorbed into someone else’s institutions, someone else’s film industry, someone else’s story. That, too, is a kind of imbalance worth naming.

Croatia, for its part, should understand all of this better than it currently does. And yet its diplomatic footprint on the continent remains strikingly thin. Outside South Africa, Croatia has no resident embassy anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa. That absence is a choice.

When Ghana’s new ambassador accredited to Croatia from Rome, Benedict Batabe Assorow, presented his credentials to President Zoran Milanović this month, he proposed something unusually concrete: regular political consultations, higher-level visits, cooperation on infrastructure, maritime industries, green energy and technology. He spoke of Ghana as a gateway for Croatian businesses into the wider African continental market. Croatia has something real to offer in return -ports, maritime expertise, renewable-energy know-how, universities, technology, cultural exchange, political respect, and, crucially, a willingness to listen. The Galeb cannot sail backwards to Accra. But the route it once travelled still poses a useful question: is Croatia mature enough to keep the parts of its past that allow it to meet Africa today as a political and economic partner, rather than as a footnote? Or football rival.

I know which team I’ll be cheering for tonight. My country.

But should Ghana win, I already know who I’ll call first. It will be Martina. Because, as in the speech she gave, years ago, where we come from, you simply show up for the people you love. Maybe this match, of all things, will finally give us another reason to make a plan to meet again.

THE LAST EXIT – BREXIT

They say immigrants steal the hubcaps

Of the respected gentlemen

They say it would be wine an' roses

If England were for Englishmen again

The Clash, “Something About England”

I must have read “Paddington Bear in the Kitchen” more times than any other book in my life, and his desperate battle with the rising dough still makes me laugh as if for the first time, even now, as I write this decades later. I had no idea there were no bears in England. They were apparently exterminated in the Middle Ages, I learned in a quick Google search after the news of the death of Michael Bond, the author of the Paddington stories.

Bond had worked as a BBC cameraman, and while serving in the Royal Army in Cairo near the end of the Second World War, he began to write. The express train from London’s international Heathrow Airport goes to Paddington Station. It was there that Bond, as a young man during the Nazi bombing of London, saw orphaned children sitting on suitcases, holding signs that read: “Please look after me.” Some years later, at Paddington Station, Bond bought his wife a teddy bear.

In the first book in the Paddington series, the London family Brown names the small brown newcomer from Peru after the station. They find him on the platform, wearing a black hat and sitting on a suitcase, with a label around his neck: “Please look after this bear.” The family takes him in despite all the differences in how they understand the world, in customs and habits. As he later explains to them, his Aunt Lucy, with whom he had lived in the Peruvian rainforest, had to move into a home for retired bears in Lima, and she sent him to England because she had heard life there was good.

“I survived in a lifeboat by eating marmalade,” Paddington tells the Brown family.

When Bond wrote the first Paddington book, in 1958, Britain was in the age of more substantial immigration from India and Pakistan.

Two years before the referendum on whether the country should remain in or leave the European Union, the feature film about Paddington Bear arrived in cinemas. The warm story of a little immigrant bear became part of a bitter political argument. Nigel Farage’s right-wing UKIP, a key advocate of Brexit, denounced the film as “a well-designed campaign” against their party and against Britain’s exit from the European Union. Bond, by then approaching ninety, gave an interview to The Guardian: “Paddington’s story is a universal story about immigrant adaptation. A story about the encounter of two cultures. A story about the struggle newcomers go through in order to adjust. Besides, there is no sadder image than that of refugees.”

The day before the British referendum in June 2016, I got off the train from Heathrow at Paddington Station. Although each time I secretly hope that there, at last, I too will meet my bear sitting on a suitcase, this time I was greeted by apocalyptic newspaper headlines. “Independence Day.” “D-Day.” “We’re Out.” “We’re In.” I wondered what a new Bond book might look like if it were called Paddington Bear and the Day of Decision. But even if he had wanted to write it, Bond never had the time. He died a year after the referendum.

Immigration is one of the central components of British history and politics, particularly in the twentieth century: from the Jewish exodus from continental Europe, the arrival of Poles during the Second World War, postcolonial immigration from Asia and Africa, contemporary asylum seekers and refugees from the Middle East, to workers arriving from Eastern Europe. At times during this long history, Britain encouraged immigration for the sake of economic growth. Granting asylum during the Cold War also served as a kind of ideological battle, helping to demonise communism and dictatorial regimes around the world while emphasising the superiority of liberal Western democracy.

Immigration in Britain has always carried within it questions of race, inequality, class and empire. In every crisis, politicians reached for these themes because public discourse was already full of stories about refugees taking someone’s job or house, breaking the law or bringing disorder. The political language that spoke of stopping immigration gave birth to new stereotypes and xenophobia. At the end of the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher said that Britons’ fear of mass immigration was legitimate because “Britishness” was too fragile to absorb it. In 1996, Britain’s Commission for Racial Equality published a report with the radical thesis that “everyone living in Britain today is either an immigrant or descended from immigrants,” given the history of settlement on the British Isles, from the Celts, Romans, Germanic peoples, Normans and onwards.

Books were written about Britain’s immigrant history. Songs were composed. Immigrant neighborhoods became tourist attractions.

In 2016, the story was somewhat different. A year earlier, the so-called refugee crisis had revealed all the fractures of the European system: from the social component and solidarity, which fell apart when a million people knocked on Europe’s door, to border protection, immigration policy, interstate cooperation and coordination. Radicalization and terrorism appeared, and they were linked to immigrant communities and refugees.

Britain itself, outside the eurozone and Schengen, had historically had a serious problem with the very concept of Europe, even though one of the first post-war voices calling for European unity came precisely from Britain. In his 1946 speech to students in Zurich, Winston Churchill, Britain’s wartime prime minister and leader of the anti-Hitler coalition, said: “There is a remedy which, in a few years, would make all Europe free and happy. It is to recreate the European family.” It had to be given “a structure under which it can dwell in peace, in safety and in freedom,” he said. “We must build a kind of United States of Europe.”

But Britain did not accept the invitation to become one of the signatories of the Treaty of Rome, which established the European Economic Community in 1957. “I shall never understand why the British withdrew,” Jean Monnet, one of the architects of the European project, later said. “In the end I came to the conclusion that perhaps it was the price of victory, the illusion that you could preserve what you had without changing anything.”

In analyses of British hostility towards the idea of Europe, explanations were sought even in old colonial animosities between Europe’s imperial nations. Although French president Charles de Gaulle twice vetoed British membership, believing the British to be enemies of the European idea and natural allies of the United States, Britain finally entered the community of European nations in 1973. Two years later, under Labour prime minister Harold Wilson, a referendum on membership was held because of reform of the common European market. Sixty-six percent voted to remain in the Community.

The hot-and-cold relationship continued into the era of Margaret Thatcher, who fiercely opposed any element of political unification. She delivered a particularly sharp speech in 1988, after Britain received lower agricultural subsidies than France. “A European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels” was how the Iron Lady thundered against it. After Thatcher left power, during the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, whose aim was to introduce the euro as a common European currency in order to counter the dominance of the dollar, Conservative prime minister John Major secured certain opt-outs and privileges, and Britain kept the pound.

The 2016 referendum was, in reality, the consequence of a series of frightened moves by Conservative prime minister David Cameron. The right-wing opposition to Cameron within the Tory ranks was growing, as was the pressure from the politically strengthening UKIP. Cameron believed that by generously offering a referendum he would calm the right and strengthen his position as a critic of the European Union who still supported remaining in it.

That same year, Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader: an old face of new energy from the left, which wanted to return social democracy to the path of its old glory after years of getting lost on the “Third Way.” He struck at the Tories over social and economic policy, but he did not seem to understand the referendum, in that context, as something that required serious mobilisation.

For a country to leave the European Union would be a world premiere. Although the founding documents contained clauses and mechanisms for withdrawal, no one could have imagined how the situation might unfold in reality if Brexit were voted through. Everyone secretly hoped it would all go smoothly. Everyone hoped that Cameron, or some other British government, would resolve the issues that troubled Britons most, from social housing to public health. And then Europe’s chaotic response to the refugee crisis became fuel for the flames of stereotype and prejudice.

I entered a hotel not far from Paddington. The receptionist was from Romania. After she handed me the room key, recited the breakfast hours and all the other hotel formalities, the topic of conversation imposed itself.

“Do you understand that the city would stop if all immigrants left London tomorrow morning? Street cleaning wouldn’t work, cafés wouldn’t work, restaurants wouldn’t work. Ask any English person whether they would do those ‘immigrant’ jobs,” the Romanian woman said rather openly. “I’m afraid. The atmosphere is not good.”

And it was not. In UKIP’s right-wing campaign, the harshest attacks were directed at “new” immigrants: the so-called cheap labour force from the newest EU member states — Poland, Romania and Bulgaria. Their shops were vandalised. Hate crimes began to rise.

Ten days before the referendum, Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered. She had been a vocal advocate for the rights of Syrian refugees. Two bullets to the head and several stab wounds to the body of a forty-year-old mother outside a library in Birstall, West Yorkshire, were accompanied by the cry: “This is for Britain! Britain always comes first!”

Her killer was Thomas Mair, a sympathiser of the neo-Nazi National Alliance. Britain’s political right rushed to distance itself from the murder and condemn the crime. While, on the eve of the referendum, a boat covered in red carnations and roses sailed along the Thames in front of Parliament in memory of Jo Cox, thousands of Londoners gathered in Trafalgar Square with mayor Sadiq Khan, the son of Pakistani immigrants, to pay tribute to the murdered MP and, as people usually do, say “no to hatred and violence.”

But after the brutal, politically motivated murder of one of their own — a crime modern British history could not remember — Labour did nothing particularly significant on any front. The murder of a woman who had fought for the rights of refugees was not a shock that awakened, a call to alarm, or a mobilizing factor. In the end, the murder remained only the Cox family’s tragedy. To paraphrase the English saying: the shit had hit the fan long before.

Someone in those days put forward a thesis about the difference between desirable and undesirable migrants. Some called the desirable ones “sexy immigrants.” They were the ones with money, the ones who had “made it.” They considered themselves welcome in Britain and did not identify in any way with the anti-immigrant rhetoric around Brexit. They had no problems in Britain and, with astonishment, simply watched what was happening. Although the phrase and the way it was used radiated elitism, attempts to explain it suggested that these sexy immigrants were supposed to be the “desirable” ones: rich, settled, the ones who contributed to British society in the right way, more so than a cleaner from Bangladesh or a Polish doctor who, for a higher salary than he could earn in a Kraków hospital, washed dishes in a fish-and-chips restaurant in Brighton.

David Goodhart, founder of Prospect magazine, in his book The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-war Immigration, challenges the concept of internationalism, global citizenship and universal solidarity, arguing that mass immigration can destroy national solidarity and become a threat to the social-democratic ideals of the welfare state in wealthy Western countries, while on the other side it destroys any possibility of development in poorer societies.

In an article for The Guardian, Goodhart summarised it this way: “In the big picture, this is about the most basic principle of welfare economics. Just as an extra pound is worth more to a poor person than to a rich one, an educated and ambitious person is worth far more to a poor country that has few such people than to a rich country that has too many. Mass immigration from poor countries creates a kind of inverted development, the human equivalent of global trade and financial imbalances. The best educated leave countries that desperately need them for rich countries that may benefit from their arrival, but do not need them in the deepest sense of the word. A fortunate few manage to accelerate the development path for themselves and their families, but slow it down for everyone left at home.”

Britain is not immune to the problems tormenting the rest of the European continent. Birth rates are falling, the population is ageing, working lives are being extended, and so is life itself. Pressure is growing on health care and social services. Cracks are appearing in the labour market. After the recession, it has become increasingly difficult to finance public services or social housing. The idea that all this would be easier to solve if immigration to Britain were restricted sounded excellent to dissatisfied voters in Essex. But was it realistic?

The “morning of decision” arrived. Stereotypically, the day began with rain. The south bank of the Thames and the area around Parliament looked like the site of a mass picnic. Thousands of media outlets from around the world had set up tents for live broadcasts. Curious tourists wandered around.

“I’m voting Leave!” a smiling middle-aged man shouted as he passed my camera.

“Excellent,” I looked at him and approached. “I need someone to tell me why he is voting for Brexit.”

He came over. He introduced himself as the owner of a transport company from London and a West Ham supporter. I laughed.

“Then you will probably know where I’m from when I tell you I’m from Croatia.”

“Aaaah, Slaven. Slaven Bilić. The greatest of the great. He did miracles for our club. Miracles!”

At the time, Bilić was being celebrated as manager in the stands of London’s Hammers, a club founded at the beginning of the twentieth century by ironworks labourers. We chatted casually for a while. He told me his wife was French, that he had tried to live in France, but it had not worked out, and that they had been in London for thirty years.

“So, you are voting for Britain to leave the European Union. Why?”

It has always amazed me how people struggle when, whatever the subject, they are asked that one question: why.

“What do you mean, why? We’ve had enough of the terror of this Europe!”

“What terror?” I asked.

“All kinds of terror,” he paused for a moment and continued. “They keep telling us what to do. And now we’re supposed to take in refugees too. We can’t take any more refugees. No one else can move here. We have to deal with ourselves, with our own country.”

“But you’re not an island — I mean, you are an island, but even if Brexit happens, you can’t really isolate yourselves from the world,” I waited for his reaction.

“We want to isolate ourselves from Europe and its failed policies.”

“What does your wife say?”

“She’s for Leave too.”

“But she is also an immigrant, given that she is French. I mean, France is a member of the European Union, but are you aware of all the possible consequences of leaving for citizens: from the reintroduction of customs duties and taxes, to workers’ rights, to citizenship? There are many issues that concern both her and you.”

I had clearly confused him.

“Oh, come on, they can’t do that!” he stared at me wide-eyed.

“They can, I mean, if tomorrow’s result goes in favour of your idea.”

“Well, we have to get rid of this influx from Eastern Europe too. It’s unbearable. It can’t be controlled.”

“So what do you think, that only they have to leave?”

“Yes, let them all go. Let our young people find work. They’re taking our social housing too. The health system can’t take it anymore,” he said quickly.

“So you want everyone to leave?”

“Yes.”

“And Slaven Bilić?”

“Well, not him.”

The day was too long. Exhausted by a full day of live television reports, each one similar to the last and ending with the conclusion that “no one can yet predict anything,” we waited for the polls to close. At that very moment, the sky seemed to collapse into the earth. Rain poured mercilessly. Through traffic chaos, puddles, unrolled cables and the lights of improvised studio positions from which water was dangerously dripping, threatening electric shocks and a global media short-circuit in London live shots, Tim Judah, my colleague from The Economist, managed to reach my position.

We stood under a miserable umbrella. Visibly agitated, he told me: “It is shocking how ready people are to believe lies and imagine some kind of future that is completely wrong. Some people think Britain is doing something different with this referendum, but this is part of a broader phenomenon we have seen in other countries. The rise of populism and nationalism: Poland, France, Hungary, and Donald Trump’s campaign in the United States. It is important to stress that this is pure English nationalism, not present throughout the whole of the United Kingdom. This is a typically English thing. But this awakening of nationalism is dangerous for England and for the United Kingdom, and also for the entire European Union.”

The counting began. Town hall by town hall. England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland. A Divided Kingdom. The result would be close, whatever it turned out to be. The night was long. I said goodnight to the receptionist on the night shift. He was Bulgarian. I set the alarm for five in the morning. The television stayed on all night. At one point I heard Nigel Farage’s voice.

Brexit had happened.

After the first morning live report, we sat down for coffee. The owner of the café, as it turned out, was from Priština, so we got a second coffee on the house. Seeing the camera beside our table, a young man approached and spoke to us quietly.

“Good morning, sorry to bother you. I’m a bit confused.”

I asked him why.

“I see you’re from television. I’d like to say this to someone. I’m really confused. You know, I voted yesterday to leave. And now I don’t know what to think. I keep asking myself what I’ve done, what I’m responsible for. This morning I’m watching television. I’m watching Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and this story they sold us — that if we leave the Union, Britain’s public health system will have an extra 350 million pounds a week — it’s a complete lie! And this morning they admit it! Publicly! On television!”

He sounded utterly lost, as if he were asking us for consolation.

Political campaign experts called the Brexit campaign “Project Fear.” It was part of the post-truth trend, appealing to emotions rather than facts or policies. In Britain, public opinion on British social attitudes was surveyed several times because of Brexit. Each survey, both before the referendum and immediately after it, and even a year later, produced more or less the same result. According to the National Centre for Social Research, 73 percent of those who voted for Britain to leave the European Union did so exclusively because of “immigration and its social consequences.”

In a televised address the day after the referendum, Cameron announced that he was stepping down. He was soon replaced as prime minister and party leader by Theresa May, until then the home secretary, under whose authority immigration had fallen. In the parliamentary elections, the Tories nearly lost, Corbyn’s Labour strengthened, and UKIP did not even enter Parliament.

From the morning after the referendum, a barrage of still unanswered questions began. What would happen to the rights of British workers in the European Union, and what to the rights of EU workers in Britain? How would trade be resolved? How would the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland be regulated? What would happen to Scotland? How would the European Union consolidate itself after Britain’s departure? Brexit negotiations began a year after the referendum, on shaky legs, with no clear ending in sight.

In the duty-free shop at Heathrow, a plush Paddington Bear stood on the shelf. I waved goodbye to him before boarding the plane. I landed in Zagreb. In the taxi, the Beatles were playing on the radio — that maddeningly simple plea to try seeing things from the other side before time, pride and politics pull everything apart.

We can work it out.

Kada sam 2023. godine objavila knjigu Nesigurni, kolega Srđan Sandić u intervjuu za Gloriju, koji mi je i dalje jedan od najboljih intervjua koje sam ikada dala, pitao me: “Zašto smatrate da je, parafrazirajući Dantea, najvrući dio pakla namijenjen neutralnima, ovima koji ne žele preuzimati odgovornost?”

Ovako sam mu odgovorila: “To je važno i zanimljivo pitanje. Nije mi jasno kada mi ljudi kažu “ja to ništa ne pratim, ništa ne čitam”. Što to znači? Da ih nije briga? Da se tako štite, da će tako biti sigurni? Ili opravdati svoje neznanje kada krenu u hrabro komentiranje na društvenim mrežama? Ako si dio zajednice, mora te biti briga, moraš znati što se događa oko tebe, odnosno moraš imati interes. Što god da radiš, čime god da se baviš, moraš znati da sve ono što se događa u svijetu utječe na nas. Kada meni, koja se bavim upravo time “što se događa”, to analiziram i stavljam u kontekst, netko kaže da “ne prati” ili da ga “ne zanima”, ne mogu mu zavidjeti, mogu samo biti iznimno tužna što živimo u takvo doba.”

Svakoga dana srećem sve više ljudi koji govore da im je sve teško pratiti, koji duge tekstove provlače kroz ChatGPT interpretaciju, oni koji govore da bi pobjegli u prirodu, ili oni koji su već pobjegli. Srećem one koji su uvjereni u samo svoju istinu, jer “imaju informacije” i znaju “tko sam ja i koga predstavljam”. Odgovornost za zajedničku stvarnost u demokracijama, njihov je važan, ako ne i ključni sastojak. Ta odgovornost znači participaciju u društvu, ne kako bi izgurao svoju istinu, nego kako bi društvo funkcioniralo.

Trenutak u kojem argument i provjerena informacija prepuštaju mjesto manipulaciji, suspektnim predikcijama, fiktivnom kockanju s budućnošću i odustajanjem od sadašnjosti, participacije u demokratskom procesu, pod krinkom samoosviještenih osnaženih individua koje gledamo po društvenim mrežama i svuda oko nas, po meni je tužno doba. To tužno doba, doba je smanjene mogućnosti stvaranja zajedničkog informacijskog prostora. Već lani Hrvatska se našla među tri zemlje s najvećim postotkom građana koji izbjegavaju vijesti. Jutros je pak objavljen novi Oxford/Reuters Digital News Report, izvješće koje nam već godinama pokazuje, kako se svijet, te način na koji se informiramo o njemu, mijenja sve većom brzinom.

Hrvatska je u ovogodišnjem izvješću najgora na svijetu u tzv. news avoidance kategoriji. Što to znači? Pa, ono, o čemu sam manje-više govorila u intervjuu sa Srđanom. Znamo da je način na koji ljudi prate informacije dominantno onaj u digitalnom prostoru. Izbjegavanje vijesti označava pojavu u kojoj građani svjesno, povremeno ili trajno smanjuju izloženost informativnim sadržajima, ne zato što informacije nisu dostupne, nego zato što ih doživljavaju kao preopterećujuće, emocionalno iscrpljujuće, nepouzdane ili politički zagađene. To nije samo medijska navika, nego simptom šireg gubitka povjerenja, osjećaja nemoći i slabljenja veze između građana i javne stvarnosti.

Ono što čitamo u ovogodišnjem izvješću jest da globalna nestabilnost u ljudima s jedne strane izaziva tjeskobu, povlačenje i cinizam. No, s druge strane i dalje postoji otvorenost prema novim izvorima i formatima. Kod ovog potonjeg, bitno je napomenuti da dosta ljudi u svijetu i dalje ima vjeru u ono što vijesti, u svom najboljem izdanju, mogu ponuditi. Puno je dobrih primjera, no zadržimo se na Hrvatskoj. Zašto je dakle ovaj opći nalaz bitan i gdje smo tu mi?

Visoku razinu izbjegavanja vijesti u Hrvatskoj treba shvatiti iznimno ozbiljno i u svoj svojoj kompleksnosti i raznorodnosti, kao upozorenje za buduću demokratsku otpornost našeg društva.

Kada 63 posto građana Hrvatske, države članice Europske unije i NATO-a, kaže da ponekad ili često izbjegava vijesti, problem nije samo povjerenje u novinarstvo ili potpuno pogrešni dosadašnji medijski model koji izluđuje i botove, a ne samo ljude. Riječ je o sustavnom slabljenju javne sposobnosti da se suoči sa stvarnošću, shvati je, pa tako kao društvo informirano promišlja i djeluje.

Statistikom naravno može na prvu manipulirati dnevna politika, pogotovo ona kojoj je big-tech algoritamski svijet poticanja bijesa i ljutnje podigao rejting kako bi već onim napola “obraćenim” dokazala da je dobamainstream politike i medija davno prošlo. Dekada za nama otvorila je nepoznati prostor kojim galopiramo u promjenu globalnog sustava, u kojem će nešto što se naziva informacijskim integritetom biti ključnim dijelom tkanja onoga što se nekoć zvalo društvom, ili prostorom u kojem se ljudi slažu oko minimuma zajedničkih interesa i uvjerenja.

Dakle, ova globalna statistika, hrvatsko je društvo, ako gledamo šire od naše lokalne, dnevne javne rasprave, napala u najgorem mogućem globalnom trenutku. Informacijsko okruženje preoblikuju umjetna inteligencija, moć platformi, strano informacijsko manipuliranje i uplitanje, domaća polarizacija, pad povjerenja u institucije i geopolitičko planetarno natjecanje između Sjedinjenih Američkih Država i Kine. Jesu li Hrvati sve te užase prokužili i čuvaju se da budu za to novo doba spremni ili ipak mora zvoniti zvono za uzbunu oko kojeg se ne brinu niti ga razumiju ni vlast niti oporba, ali ni mediji, njihovi vlasnici, urednici, novinari, institucije, nevladine udruge, pravni okvir, Sabor? Ako news avoidance u Hrvatskoj, u doba globalne i europske krize, stavimo u korelaciju s izlaskom na prve europske post-COVID izbore 2024., tijekom rata u Ukrajini, onda možemo spekulirati i o još nečemu. Naime, ako u Hrvatskoj, posljednoj zemlji koja je ušla u EU, te je svoju slobodu izborila u posljednjem ratu na europskom kontinentu prije ruske agresije na Ukrajinu, 80 posto građanki i građana s pravom glasa nije izašlo na izbore za Europski parlament, onda možda možemo govoriti i o mogućem overall democracy avoidanceu, ali ostavit ću to stručnjacima i ozbiljnim sociološkim i politološkim istraživanjima…

Ako se vratimo samo na informacijski integritet jednog malog europskog društva u doba polikriza, a po definiciji on znači da je javni informacijski prostor dovoljno pouzdan, transparentan i otporan da građani mogu donositi odluke na temelju činjenica, a ne manipulacija, propagande, kaosa ili algoritamski pojačanih laži, onda situaciju u Hrvatskoj možemo opisati s nekoliko preklapajućih ranjivosti.

Prva je dakle izbjegavanje informiranja u visokom postotku koje upućuje ne samo na krizu medija ili političkog i javnog prostora, nego, kako sam već napisala, emocionalnu iscrpljenost, duboko nepovjerenje, algoritamsku izloženost i građansku kognitinvu neotpornost, te traženje alternativa.

Druga činjenica, koje je svatko, iole racionalan, svjestan, jest zagađeno i polarizirano domaće informacijsko okruženje. Strukturna slabost medija potaknuta je i vlasništvom koje više ne razumije suštinsku demokratsku ulogu informiranja i novinarstva, i slabim uredničkim i upravljačkim modelima, lošim profesionalnim vođenjem u sustavu obrazovanja i medijskim kućama, nekontroliranim internetskim i platformskim prostorom koji nagrađuje bijes, identitetske sukobe i sigurnost koju pružaju dezinformacijski ili konspiracijski bubbleovi. Tu je i profesionalno i kadrovski slab institucionalni državni aparat, watchdogovi... Politika je kod nas, sve, samo ne ekskulpirana. Vladajuća stranka ima snažnu kontrolu nad ritmom javnog diskursa. Oporba je u većini slučajeva reaktivna i kao da ne razumije šire informacijsko okruženje u kojem se nalazimo. U paralelnim informacijskim svjetovima, stvaraju se alternativna značenja i vrijednosti, koji su emocionalno učinkovitiji i algoritamski poticani. Strane manipulacije iskorištavaju domaće rascjepe, kroz dubiozne portale i NN internetske izvore u medijski i newsfeed diskurs društvenih mreža ulaze različiti globalno važni narativi koji se vežu uz lokalne teme nerazriješenih povijesnih sukoba, korupcijskih afera, slabe institucionalne otpornosti i odgovornosti.

Slučajevi u Njemačkoj i Velikoj Britaniji, neke su od studija slučaja o kojima se kod nas malo piše ili govori. Ono što danas, u vremenu strateškog nadmetanja za planetarnu sigurnost, resurse i premoć, zasigurno znamo, jest da novi ekonomski model i tzv. nova industrijska revolucija (AI), donosi i nove ideje o obliku društvene organizacije i ideološke koncepte, o kojima govore mnogi suvremeni politički filozofi, poput Mikhaila Minakova, ali i Papa Lav XIV u njegovoj enciklici.

O tome se ne razgovara, dok uz sve to, Hrvatska, još nema ni ozbiljnu arhitekturu upravljanja umjetnom inteligencijom.

CEE AI Index 2026, prvo istraživanje koje mjeri stratešku spremnost jedanaest država srednje i istočne Europe za umjetnu inteligenciju, smjestio je Hrvatsku na samo dno. Estonija je prva s 59 bodova. Hrvatska je zadnja s 32. U kategoriji “Okruženje”, koja mjeri upravljačke okvire i digitalnu infrastrukturu, Hrvatska ima 27 bodova - najlošiji rezultat u toj kategoriji.

Promjena ekonomsko-društvene paradigme, što AI doba u koje smo ušli jest, nije samo ekstrakcijsko-energetski-tehnološko-ekonomski povezani ekosustav.

AI je paradigmatska promjena, ona je javna uprava, izbori, obrazovanje, pravosuđe, zdravstvo, mediji, radna mjesta, sigurnosne procjene i javna komunikacija. Umjetna inteligencija, ponavljam još jednom, nije samo digitalno, STEM pitanje ili pitanje konkurentnosti. To je pitanje demokratskog prostora, a samim tim i upravljanja.

Izvješće NATO-ovog centra izvrsnosti za strateške komunikacije o novom informacijskom okruženju, predstavljeno početkom godine, govoreći o čestoj nemogućnosti imaginacije budućnosti, poglavito u političkim i policy krugovima, piše, među ostalim i o tome kako se oblikuje društvo paralelno s umjetnom inteligencijom, te snagom big-techa koji je rastao ekstrakcijom naših podataka: “Nadzorni kapitalizam nije tehnička nužnost, nego politički izbor koji se može osporiti reguliranjem monetizacije podataka, obvezivanjem na procese decentralizacije i razvojem otvorenih alternativa. Demokracije mogu odbaciti načine na koje industrija predstavlja i poistovjećuje ekstrakciju bihevioralnih podataka sa zaštitom individualne privatnosti, prepoznajući da su ti sustavi politički konstruirani i reverzibilni u demokratskom interesu, a ne tehnički neizbježni.”

Zaključak poziva na uzbunu i ozbiljan rad. Citiram: “Prvo je tu AI stack -tehnološka infrastruktura putem koje će se širiti buduće komunikacije. Tko će je naposljetku posjedovati, ili preciznije, tko će raspolagati vlastitim pojedinačnim tehnološkim slojem, odredit će način na koji će se utjecaj ostvarivati nad komunikacijskim sadržajem i procesima. Ako Europa želi biti važan akter, postavlja se pitanje koliko će autonomno ili suvereno biti njezino vlasništvo nad tom infrastrukturom. Europsko oklijevanje u ulaganju u neovisne kapacitete tako postaje pitanje strateške sigurnosti, a ne tek geoekonomije.

Drugo, na koji će način jedinstvena narav te buduće tehnologije oblikovati ili potencijalno iskriviti istinito izvještavanje utemeljeno na dokazima, o kojem ovise europske demokracije? Ako se ideologija demokratskog mišljenja može od početka ugraditi u tehnologiju koja je po svojoj naravi inherentno autokratska, tada to postaje prioritet za Europu koja samu sebe vidi kao bastion liberalne demokracije.

I treće, ako se to ne dogodi, dok nove i digitalne tehnologije istodobno napreduju brzinom koju malo koja država može razumjeti, a kamoli kontrolirati, otvorena informacijska okruženja postajat će sve ranjivija na manipulaciju. Posljedično, strojevi koji misle sami za sebe i donose odluke neovisno o ljudskom sudjelovanju predstavljaju prijetnju društvu bez presedana. Implikacije za buduće ratovanje su jasne.”

Dakle rasprava o konkurentnosti, ne može se, barem u Europi kakvu smo znali, i kakva deklarativno želi biti, voditi bez paralelne rasprave, ne samo o regulaciji, nego i o poimanju stvarnosti onih koji žive na europskom kontinentu u doba sustavnog globalnog preslagivanja. Hrvatskoj, zemlji kojoj nedostaje i kadrova za transfer društva u to novo doba, treba još puno toga, recimo i neki saborski odbor za umjetnu inteligenciju, digitalnu suverenost, otpornost i informacijski prostor. Država bi trebala opću inventuru onoga što se koristi, na čemu se radi, svih dionika, budućih kapaciteta i jasan orijentir za AI governance, jer to je, ako hoćete, i sposobnost države da zna gdje joj je mozak.

Europa s paketom akata iz područja tehnološke suverenosti, pokušava izgurati među ostalim i to, da demokracija, zdravo tržište i javni prostor prežive u infrastrukturi koju sve manje kontroliraju nacionalne vlade, a pažnja i utjecaj sve su više van, ne samo europske, nego ljudske kontrole. Kao nekome tko se cijeli život bavi informacijskim prostorom, ovo je pitanje koje mi ne da spavati.

U Hrvatskoj, zemlji u kojoj većina građana izbjegava vijesti, a čije turističke ljepote promovira Amerikanac s hrvatskom putovnicom, John Malkovich, takva rasprava mora se pokrenuti. Nedavni američki potez prema Anthropicu, kojim je Washington pod izlikom nacionalne sigurnosti ograničio strani pristup najnaprednijim AI modelima, pokazao je još jednom kako živimo u beskrupuloznom dobu izgradnje nove geopolitičke infrastrukture moći. Pogonjena podacima kojim smo je hranili svi mi ljudi, ona sada mijenja i naše kognitivne kapacitete i vrijednosti i demokratsku otpornost. I ako smo na optimističnom dijelu spektra i povjerujemo da s s tom novom industrijskom AI revolucijom stiže koncept organizacije društava koje će biti neka nova renesansa, razgovor o tome mora se voditi paralelno s topotom data centara. Biti John Malkovich može se danas reinterpetirati i na način da svi mi s tehnologijom koja nas obuzima, možemo ući u tuđi život ili stvoriti novu personu, ali, kao i u samom filmu, praznina u nama teško se ispuni.

My son wanted to bring Dubioza Kolektiv to Canada. It was a perfect Balkan plan. After Bosnia and Herzegovina defeated Italy and qualified for the World Cup, an old Dubioza song became the anthem of the national team. Tens of thousands flooded streets of Sarajevo, celebrating and chanting: “I am from Bosnia, take me to America”. It was the chorus that resonated with the country and the tournament before the World Cup had even begun.

“Give me their number, we have to organize their concert in Toronto at the tournament opening, it would be a blast!” My son’s enterpreneurial spirit possesed our living room, with the social media euphoria and the knowledge that I’m the friend of the band. But his business oriented mindset and overconfidence, together with the long standing affection for their music, was soon faced with reality. Dubioza Kolektiv, itself a travelling republic, noisy embassy of people who spread joy around the world on stadiums in front of large crowds, with the lyrics that hit hard and are wrapped in seductive ska melodies and brass section, dissect the world sharply from the Balkan perspective. Often in their career, they have been told to wait, first, as kids in the war, for peace and dignity, this time, like many times before, for visas or working permits. This was, in a way, their story too. They can be global musical success. But, at the end, they do come from the Balkans.

I am from Bosnia, take me to America
I really want to see Statue of Liberty
I can no longer wait, take me to United States
Take me to Golden Gate, I will assimilate…

So, soon after the Bosnia and Herzegovina qualified for the World Cup, TikTok picked-up the song, originally named “U.S.A.” People who could not find the country on a map found the chorus through algorithms. International media, from BBC to Fox News took it over from social media, and treated it as a cool news, for the end of the bulletin, comic Balkan football chant, betting it will outperform Shakira’s song, it was funny because the English was broken. But the song was never really a joke, it was more of a self-reflection, or if you want, forever Balkan quest for self-respect and respect of the others. The common song of all the Balkan people in this world. Who think the grass is greener on the other side, who have to migrate, to survive. Just to find out, that at the end… Well, before this end, let’s reinterpret the song, for the sake of geopolitics. And the World Cup, of course.

Balkan instinct that the future is always somewhere else, always sounded to me like the overall tragedy of a region where mothers raised their children to first - fight for and love their homeland and then help them pack.

The grass is always greener in neighbour’s courtyard
I wish to leave this nightmare, go to the promised land
Please, take me to your leader, I want my green card
I want to fly over like a rocket from the Balkans

I want to start all over, and turn a new page
Forget this dreadful story, escape the Stone Age
I’m waiting for a chance to get out of the cage
I feel like a slave on a minimal wage

There are many reasons for people leaving the countries of the region. But, talking about the context, when you hear this song today, there are many more meanings and interpretations. Tomorrow, BiH plays Canada in Toronto. Officially it is Group B, Match 3. Unofficially it is the most perfect migration essay FIFA never intended to commission - Bosnia and Herzegovina, the country lot of people left, Canada, the country many dreamed of reaching, U.S.A. the dream country in the song, which at the end is not like a dream at all, Mexico, the other co-host, living forever next to the American dream, “promised land” and its fences.

There are many stories that will run on the pitch tomorrow, but for me, one of the most beautiful sport stories is the one of Esmir Bajraktarević. One year older than my son, born in Wisconsin, formed in the United States. A young footballer who could have belonged neatly to the country of his birth, if history ever allowed Balkan children to belong anywhere. His parents fled Srebrenica. He played in the American national youth team. Then, when the time for the World Cup came, he chose Bosnia and Herzegovina.

“I carry it in my blood.” He once said.

The world likes football because football makes complicated lives legible. A shirt does what a passport cannot. A boy born in Appleton can carry Srebrenica into Toronto. A team can include Muslims, Catholics, Orthodox, diaspora children, domestic league survivors, men whose parents would not have stood together in the same political sentence. Then the whistle blows and, for ninety minutes, the map finally behaves.

Meanwhile, the World Cup of unity has met the other borders.

Somali referee Omar Abdulkadir Artan, selected for the tournament, was denied entry into the United States despite reportedly holding a valid visa. Reuters reported that he had been set to become the first Somali to officiate at a World Cup; U.S. authorities cited security concerns, while FIFA said it does not control immigration decisions.

Gianni Infantino, standing before the world on the eve of the opener, reached for the language of the tired parent and the careful bureaucrat. FIFA, he said, was “not kings of the world.” People should “chill, relax.”

Tell that to a Somali referee at Miami airport. Tell that to fans from countries whose teams qualified but whose passports now arrive carrying suspicion. In the U.S. State Department’s FY2025 B-visa refusal table, Bosnia and Herzegovina stood at 14.89 percent. Iran was 62.44 percent. Ghana was 64.34 percent. Senegal was 73.96 percent. Somalia, not a team in this World Cup story, but the one from Minneapolis, and the recent ICE battle, the one from the referee held at the border, was 83.52 percent.

So, the migration promise has always been double. Come. Do not come. Work. Do not ask for belonging. Entertain us. Score goals. Cook food. Drive taxis. Build hospitals. Win medals. Referee our matches. But at the border, please explain yourself.

The Balkans know this script. It lived for decades inside the grammar of conditional welcome. This same script is something I feel often, even though I’m from a country that is EU member. You have to still fight harder to show you are smarter, more knowledgeable, skillful from those who claim the “real” meaning of being European, or American.

Europe today says to Western Balkans - reform first. Rule of law first. Institutions first. France and others speak of conditionality, gradual integration, absorption capacity. The European Commission’s Growth Plan for the Western Balkans promises access to parts of the single market, deeper reform, regional cooperation, and more pre-accession funding before full membership. Policy people call this pragmatic. Balkan people hear: not yet. Internal EU crisis are more and more caused by its own cowardice.

The OECD says about one-fifth of the population born in the Western Balkan lives abroad. That is not only brain drain. It is heart drain. Nurse drain. Engineer drain. Goalkeeper drain. It is the quiet export of Sunday lunches, jokes and future taxpayers. And then the same Europe wonders why nationalism always becomes a cheap substitute for dignity. When the future is delayed long enough, someone will always sell you a fake story.

Dubioza Kolektiv understands the region better than Brussels. The song about the absurdity of a world in which departure becomes more credible than hope. Its pidgin English maybe makes people laugh, because if it was understood correctly it would make them scream.

At the same time, home can be corrupt, poor, cruel, exhausted and full of men and ideas who have been in charge since last century, but home is also the smell of coffee, the aunt who overfeeds you, the stadium, the curse word that no other language can translate properly. You can leave a country and still carry its weather in your bones. To migrate is not easy, and it is never to steal from someone else, it is to find your chance under this Sun. While there is still this big lie, that we all really do have the same chance.

I hoped I′d find what I need, I’ll be free like a bird

Now we’re pushed in a ghetto like a sheep in a herd

All the promises I heard became empty words

Completely disconnected from the rest of the world

The grass is never greener in neighbor′s courtyard

I want to start all over, return to no man′s land

Send greetings to your leader, don’t want your green card

I want to fly back like a rocket to the Balkans…

On the same day Bosnia and Herzegovina plays Canada, the EU’s new Pact on Migration and Asylum enters into application. It is another story of our and American continent. Of our neighborhoods, borders and visions of societies. Pope Leo XIV is at the Canary Islands listening to the stories of migrants, who have risked long and perilous journeys across the Atlantic to reach Europe.

“You are not numbers or files, you are people,” the Pope told a gathering on the Gran Canaria, adding that he “bowed” before their dignity.

The EU says the pact put in place from today is meant to manage migration and update the common asylum system.

So while Bosnian fans sing in Toronto, a Somali referee is not allowed in the USA, while Europe tightens procedures, while Balkan youth keep leaving, while politicians say “values” and nothing changes, football will again try to do the impossible – be, at its best the opposite of the border.

A young man from Wisconsin whose parents fled Srebrenica puts on a Bosnia and Herzegovina jersey. Maybe there won’t be a Dubioza concert in Toronto, but a song everyone thinks is funny, will erupt on the stadium. And this will become a history lesson with trumpets.

Damn it. I’ll cry.

One day, when you reach the end
One day, you will understand
One day, back to roots my friend
No place like a motherland…

Dubioza Kolektiv USA

Every year, when we gather on the Croatian island of Cres as Europe’s Futures fellows group, my collegues from other European countries walk past the statue of Frane Petrić on their way to Moise Palace, toward another conversation about the continent’s future.

Most do not know who he was. This year, as the only Croatian in this group, I wanted to welcome my friends to Cres, with the couple of words about Petrić. As we will again convene panels about the future, talk about resilience, competitiveness, enlargement, security, technology, values, strategic autonomy, we should not forget about the animating force we all need. Imagination and purpose. Maybe we can find some in the work of Petrić and the place in which we are gathering.

Frane Petrić, born on Cres in the sixteenth century, was not a footnote in Renaissance humanism. His “Happy City” is an important part of the long European tradition of thinking about the ideal political community. It stands in conversation with Plato and Aristotle and it was written after Thomas More’s “Utopia” and before Campanella’s “City of the Sun”.

The title can sound naïve to modern ears. A happy city. In our age of war, risk dashboards and crisis management, happiness is a word we don’t mention. For Petrić happiness were fundamental conditions under which human beings could live well together. His happy city was an ethical and political project. It had to educate, protect, order, inspire and elevate. It had to make citizens and create a common life.

Today’s Europe is not short of strategies, policy papers, frameworks, instruments… It has declarations about values and spreadsheets about competitiveness. We listen every day vocabulary of urgency, but not always the one on purpose. Europe knows what it fears: Russia, China, Trumpism, technological dependence, democratic decay, demographic decline, irrelevance.

The question of the Happy City is whether there is still an offer of collective life strong enough to motivate sacrifice, responsibility and belief. Europe today asks its citizens to endure transition, inflation, insecurity, rearmament, climate anxiety, migration pressures and technological disruption. But it often forgets to answer the most basic political question: for what kind of future? Would we die for Europe? What kind of happy cities of Europe? We do have something called TheHappy City index, as an annual global ranking based on the research that evaluates and ranks cities worldwide based on their residents’ quality of life and well-being. From public participation and transparency, to environment, all were the things Petrić already wrote about.

A society cannot live on risk management alone and a union cannot be held together only by regulation. To survive, democracy needs a credible moral horizon. Petrić’s Renaissance world understood that cities were built from ideas about human purpose.

Europe’s future is too often imagined from its capitals, rooms of whatever institutional power. But European thought has in the past also came from the margins, places where worlds met, empires passed, languages mixed and identity was never simple. They were fresh, bold and central. Is the periphery the place in which we can find more happy cities?

Petrić’s Cres is not peripheral to Europe. It is one of the places from which Europe can remember itself or rethink itself.

The Happy City is therefore provocation to us, people who are now part of Europe’s Futures Initiative. It asks whether Europe still believes it can be more than a market, regulatory power or a defensive arrangement. More than a memory without meaning for tomorrow .

Frane Petrić was asking, five centuries ago: what kind of common life would make us worthy of the future we keep invoking?

Welcome to Cres!

(foto: Jelena Janković / ZeKaeM)

Za nedavnog posjeta Japanu gledala sam hoću li kupiti wakizashi. To je, kako sam shvatila tamo, samurajski mač za borbu prsa o prsa, manji od katane, ispričavam se na neukosti, nemojte me doslovna hrvatska publiko stručna u svemu pa i u hladnom oružju pilit’ sad oko samog naziva. Prijateljica me gledala u čudu pitajući da što će mi uopće takvo što, jer nisam inače, osim zbog nužde stručnih geopolitičkih analiza, fan naoružanja i drugih različitih, a toliko sličnih, falusoidnih psihičkih poremećaja čovječanstva. Ali negdje u mojoj potresenoj svijesti rađala se u dalekoj zemlji izlazećeg sunca, onkraj Roppongija u kojem je Uma Thurmann s nekim drugim mačem sjekla bandu Crazy 88 po birtiji zvanoj Gonpachi Nishi-Azabu, misao da će kad-tad morati doći vrijeme za borbu prsa o prsa. Valja se na vrijeme pripremiti.

Gledala sam u svom polustoljetnom životu mnoge predstave Olivera Frljića. Neke bolje, neke lošije. Podvlačenje crte pod opus, daje objektivnu ocjenu o njemu kao jednom od najtalentiranijih umjetnika koje je naša teatarska borba dala. Sjećam se premijere Đinđića u Ateljeu 212, gdje je beogradska malograđanština pala u nesvijest ne mogavši primiti u svoj um kazališnu interpretaciju vlastite stvarnosti. Prošlo je desetljeće i pol, a ta stvarnost se toliko već posvuda poremetila da je nestvarna, pa je ni kazališna Frljićeva autoironična, pomalo razočarana, ali ciljano ljutito raskalašena pljuska usred lica ne može dostići. U svijetu luđaka i ludila, poremećaja ljudske inteligencije do te razine da je valjda ova umjetna spašava, dogodila se prošlotjedna premijera tog Frljića, zbog koje je policija trebala stajati i na ulazu u kazalište u centru Zagreba.

Svačega sam se u svom rodnom gradu nagledala, ne sjećam se da je policija čuvala kazalište.

Da se vratim na wakizashi. Ne morate biti sredovječno cinični, autoironični, pomalo razočarani ili u hormonalnom disbalansu, da, ako ste žena, shvaćate kako je vrag odnio šalu. Epsteinove armije razularile su se do te mjere da se svakako treba zaštititi. Poremećaj je toliki da se i fikcija kazališta mora sačuvati od zbilje. Pogotovo ako tu fikciju kreira netko tko u sebi nosi, od svih mogućih poremećaja koji smetaju poremećeniji realitet, iskreni feminizam. To valjda sve ove iz realnog svijeta suštinski ljuti. Skok na skok evo upravo svega onoga što smo gledali u mraku... Moralne panike, čistunstva koje promovira kolektivno nasilje. Eto vraga. Ecce homo…

Hrvatski teatar često eunuški, institucionalno kastriran strahom od konflikta, stvarne društvene opasnosti. Puno koreografije progresivnosti, ali vrlo malo stvarnog rizika. Visceralna reakcija mentalne palanke na kazalište koje producira nacionalni neprijatelj, nosi novu ironiju. Dio ushićene ljevice plješće mu kao potvrdi same sebe, kao da je predstava politički filter za vlastitu moralnu superiornost. Kao da čin gledanja automatski znači čin hrabrosti. Drugi dio, onaj malograđanskog purgeraja, prvo je zbunjen, da bi brzo pao u obrazac salemske histerije: skandalizira se reinterpretacijama, “oskvrnućem”, seksualnošću, politikom na sceni. Desnica, ah desnica… Kao scena Gooble, Gooble iz Freaksa. Društvo koje proizvodi čudovišta da ne bi pogledalo vlastitu okrutnost.

"It is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves." Kazalište vam ipak to može napraviti, može to raditi iz scene u scenu i potpuno vas izluditi, a može vas non-stop lagati, kao loša teve emisija, panel, društvenomrežna hajka, politički linč, lažna optužba, moral kao tehnologija kontrole, pijana zabava zvana život koja se valjda jedino živi u odnosu prema drugom, nikada bivajući svjesnim sebe.

U iluziji vlastite nevinosti, prijetvorno zgražanje i namjerno izvrtanje istine prekrasan je obrazac. Mrzim istinu, reče autor. A ona je uvijek salemska Marilyn Monroe, crveni abortus baloni, žensko tijelo kao vječno bojno polje, pa i preko tog kazališta koje valjda i dalje laže, ako su svi drugi u pravu.

Laže katarzom, kolektivnim emocijama, idejom da je publika nakon dva sata u mraku postala bolja, hrabrija ili moralnija. Po izlasku, povratak strukturama kukavičluka, oportunizma i malograđanskog konformizma. Revolucija do trenutka kada im se prolije vino. Nikako ritualna, menstrualna krv.

Svjetski Salem i Salem Hrvatska kao privid vlastite čistoće dok se kolje po kućama. Istine nema, samo prokaži prstom. Ako globalno društvo u svojim provincijskim partikularitetima ne može preraditi traume nikako drugačije nego kroz perpetuirano gubljenje sposobnosti racionalne rasprave, onda smo osuđeni na vječni pakao na zemlji. Salem kao mehanizam, trajno stanje. Bolje progon nego suočavanje. Salem s vama. Salem alejkum braćo. Sestre će se s wakizashijem spremne morati na koncu i ove povijesti, opet snaći same. Prsa o prsa.

Freaks, 1932. (dir: Todd Browning)

There's been growing angst over the rise of artificial intelligence. Even as more people report using the technology, many also worry about its impact on jobs, relationships, politics and humanity itself. Pope Leo will address that concern today at 11.30h in his first encyclical, a major teaching addressed to the world's 1.4 billion Catholics. The encyclical is called magnifica humanitas, or magnificent humanity. According to the Vatican, it will be focused on: "safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence." Here is why me and my company Europe Future Centre, which is part of Worldwide Alliance for AI and Democracy, think it matters:

Možda zato što sam majka devetnaestogodišnjeg sina. Možda zato što znam kako izgleda trenutak kad ti dijete izađe iz kuće i kaže: “Vidimo se kasnije.” Uvijek postoji ta strepnja, i sreća da će uvijek doći taj trenutak, kad ćete se ipak vidjeti kasnije. Dok se to ne dogodi.

Dragi mladi čovječe iz Drniša,

ne poznajem tvoje lice osim kroz nekoliko fotografija koje sada kruže internetom, tim hladnim digitalnim grobljem na kojem tragedije postaju sadržaj brže nego što ljudi uspiju udahnuti od šoka. Ne znam kakav ti je bio glas, ne znam ni kakav si čovjek tek trebao postati, ono što čitam pokazuje mi da si bio plemenito i zdravo, drago biće. A plemenitih je danas sve manje.

Ne postoje riječi koje mogu opisati moje čuđenje da je zločinac, opasan i zloglasan, lutao slobodan ovim svijetom, spreman za ovakav užas. U svojoj novinarskoj karijeri sretala sam se s ekstremnom brutalnošću. Ratnim zločinima na svim stranama svijeta, masovnim ubojicama, silovateljima, kriminalnim umovima različitih oblika i predznaka. Odnos društva prema zločinu i zločincima, svake vrste, pokazatelj je kakvo je to društvo. Nadam se i želim vjerovati da smo mi dobro društvo, koje uvijek mora i može bolje. I da će iz ovog užasa moći izaći nešto bolje. Želim vjerovati.

Živimo u vremenu i prostoru u kojem se agresija nagrađuje pažnjom, dominacija pretvara u status, a poniženje drugih u oblik zabave. Granice između stvarnog nasilja i performansa nasilja postale su zamagljene. Društvene mreže, politički diskurs, tribalizam, banalizacija zla ili veličanje zločinaca, sve to proizvodi atmosferu u kojoj empatija postaje slabost, a emocionalna tupost mehanizam opstanka. Ne znam što bi bilo da je bilo. Mladog života više nema. Jasno je da svatko nakono ovakvog užasa želi odgovore. Pita se, tko još naokolo šeta slobodan.

Od Prečkog do Drniša, negdje u podzemnim vodama teče nešto što brine. Atmosfera i narativi koji lako dovedu do toga da zločinci hodaju slobodno svijetom, da se žene i djeca sve češće hladnokrvno ubijaju. Kako stvarati hrabro i zdravo društvo, građana i institucija koji su u stanju oblikovati zajednice povjerenja i ljubavi. Da, ljubavi. Je li teško danas i čuti tu riječ? Tko će nam kao građankama i građanima dati tu ruku kada se dogodi još jedan Luka Ritz, novi femicid, kada se prebiju gastarbajteri iz Nepala, kada netko pobaca djecu s balkona ili spremi ubijenu sestru u škrinju i drži je tamo godinama?

Iza ovakve tragedije ostaje golema praznina svega što nije stiglo postojati. Života koji nije dovršen. Rečenica koje neće biti izgovorene. Ne postoje prave riječi za gubitak i majku koja će zauvijek osluškivati na vratima.

Dok čitam naše medije, prepune detalja o ubojici, kroz glavu mi prolazi nešto što me puno toga naučilo o društvima, javnosti i odnosu prema zločincima. Novozelandska premijerka Jacinda Ardern obećala je da nikada neće izgovoriti ime napadača u Christchurchu. “Tražio je mnogo toga svojim činom terora, ali jedno od toga bila je i zloglasnost - zato me nikada nećete čuti da izgovaram njegovo ime”. Neka institucije rade svoj posao, ali i neka preuzmu odgovornost. Kada se kaže mi jesmo, a ovi drugi nisu, a svi su u stvari dio institucionalne mreže koja čini društvo i državu, onda su svi krivi, a i nitko, onda povjerenje, ako ništa, jednih u druge, nema na čemu rasti niti stajati. A mi, mi moramo razumjeti da institucije trebaju biti i humane i odgovorne, ali i mi sami, jedni prema drugima. I koliko će god u svijetu uvijek biti groznih zločina, nikada se ne bi smjelo smetnuti s uma, da je vladavina prava u kojoj institucije funkcioniraju, osnova pravednih odnosa i povjerenja u demokratskom društvu.

Slava ti mladi i plemeniti čovječe.

Od tvoje plemenitosti imamo još puno za naučiti.

****

Uhapšen u svojoj magli,
zakopčan u svojem mraku,
svako svojoj zvijezdi nagli,
svojoj ruži, svojem maku.

I svak žudi svetkovine
djetinjastih blagostanja,
sretne mrene i dubine
nevinosti i neznanja.

I na oblak koji tišti,
i na munju koja prijeti,
naša blaga Nada vrišti;
biti čisti. Biti sveti.

I kad nema Našeg Duha
među nama jednog sveca,
treba i bez bijela ruha
biti djeca, biti djeca.

(Tin Ujević, Uhapšen u svojoj magli)

.

Bila je veljača 1999. ne sjećam se datuma, ali se sjećam da je padao ogroman snijeg. Svojim crvenim Unom klizila sam po popodnevnom mraku prema Prisavlju. “Intervju će se održati u uredu Mirka Galića.” Istodobno na radiju 101 u Aktualcu koji sam slušala, javili su da je isti taj Galić dao ostavku kao član uprave.

Katedrala duha, objavila je krajem 1998. ogromnu audiciju, putem koje su trebali zaposliti različite struke, od novinara, do inžinjera, pravnika… Nakon prvog kruga na FER-u, nekadašnjem ETF-u, na kojem se testiralo opće znanje i inteligencija, drugog kruga, u Vodnikovoj gdje smo dokazivali znanje stranog jezika, treći je krug bio taj intervju, slijedilo je snalaženje pred kamerom i ocjena službe za jezik i govor. Mogla bih sad o detaljima i tog intervjua, cijele audicije i godine koja je slijedila, prve pripravničke na javnom servisu, godine Tuđmanove smrti, velikih prevrata, godine u kojoj sam nakon što sam primljena u radni odnos, “za nagradu” za najbolje rezultate na svim tim silnim ispitivanjima i krugovima audicije, zajedno s Vjeranom Mišurcem dospjela u informativni program… Mogla bih o godinama koje su slijedile, ukupno njih 15, tijekom kojih sam radeći u redakciji vanjske politike zaradila dvije Marije Jurić Zagorke, jednu od prvih, ako ne i prvu nagradu nazvanu po Jošku Martinoviću, gdje se ono što sam stvarala, s kolegama Draganom Nikolićem i Dinkom Cepakom, često nazivalo pionirskim… Mogla bih o tisućama sati emisija i javljanja uživo, puteva, svađa, lijepih i ružnih trenutaka, kompleksnom programu ulaska Hrvatske u Europsku uniju koji smo odradili… Mogla bih o odlasku s javnog servisa, kada smo sjedeći pred cijelom upravom objašnjavali kako bi novi digitalni model televizije trebao izgledati, no sluha za radikalne zahvate nije bilo, ali o tome svemu neću. Stavit ću samo par slika. A nakon tih slika, povodom ove okrugle obljetnice javnog servisa, za koju sam dobila poziv, ali sam također shvatila da sam nestala iz drugog izdanja HRT leksikona u kojem ima puno imena onih koji tu kuću ničim nisu zadužili, kao i mnogi pozvani u Lisinski, napisat ću par rečenica zašto mislim da je javni servis važan za budućnost, a s obzirom na vrijeme u kojem živimo…

Stota obljetnica HRT-a nije dakle samo povijest jedne medijske kuće. To je podsjetnik da demokracije imaju i svoju nevidljivu infrastrukturu: škole, arhive, sudove, ceste i javnost- zajednički prostor javne riječi. HRT 2026. obilježava 100 godina Hrvatskoga radija i 70 godina Hrvatske televizije, s ishodištem u prvom radijskom javljanju iz Zagreba 15. svibnja 1926.

U vremenu strateškog nadmetanja, informacija više nije samo sadržaj. Ona je energent, oružje, tržište i granica. Zato pitanje javnog servisa u Hrvatskoj nije samo neka lokalna rasprava o programu, pristojbi ili kadrovima, politici ili utjecaju. To je šire i važno europsko pitanje u vremenu strateškog nadmetanja. Može li EU govoriti o informacijskoj suverenosti ako njezini građani zajedničku stvarnost sve češće primaju kroz algoritme privatnih platformi, komercijalnu ekonomiju bijesa i vanjske kampanje utjecaja? I kako tome doskočiti? Pitaju se uglavnom rijetki dobrohotni političari na kontinentu, vojni stratezi, ali i akademija, koja se teoretski bavi medijima, ali je često u svom balonu lišena razumijevanja stvarnih znanja koje novinari i oni koji su godinama imali ruke u realnom medijski posredovanom blatu.

Javni servis je, u najboljem smislu, stara ideja za novo doba. Ne kao državni medij. Ne kao megafon vlasti. Nego kao institucija koja bi trebala čuvati minimum zajedničkog svijeta, javnog prostora u kojem se svi mogu složiti oko činjenica. Javnog prostora koji čine provjerena informacija, kulturna memorija, jezični prostor, krizna komunikacija i demokratska rasprava koja nije i ne smije biti potpuno podređena brzini, profitu i polarizaciji.

Ali to sve vrijedi pod jednim uvjetom - javni servis mora biti javni, a ne politički. Europski model za 21. stoljeće mora značiti stabilno financiranje, profesionalnu upravljačku strukturu, transparentna imenovanja, snažne uredničke statute i stvarni firewall između vlade, stranaka i redakcija. Ne prazni aktivizam, nego ozbiljan profesionalan integritet svjestan odgovornosti i vremena u kojem živimo.

Upravo Europski akt o slobodi medija naglašava zaštitu uredničkih odluka od neprimjerenog utjecaja te potrebu za održivim i predvidivim financiranjem javnih medija. Servirani su nam i Akt o digitalnim uslugama, kao i cijeli paket nazvan demokratskim štitom, za koji mnogi aparatčici u zgradama Europske komisije nemaju ideju kako stvoriti pravi impact. Jer Europa nije plaća i sheetovi, Europa se mora napuniti sadržajem. Vrijednostima. Alat postoji u informacijskoj infrastrukturi koji jedino Europa ima, a zove se mreža javnih servisa.

Ako Europa gradi obrambenu, energetsku i tehnološku suverenost, mora izgraditi i informacijsku. Bez nje, sve ostalo počiva na praznoj priči. Jer društvo koje ne zna kome vjerovati ne može dugo odlučivati zajedno.

Zato jubilej HRT-a ne smije biti samo svečanost sjećanja ili parada politike. Trebao bi biti početak ozbiljnog razgovora o budućnosti: kako od javnih servisa stvoriti europski demokratski ekosustav, važan za budućnost - ne poslušan, zatvoren, nostalgičan, arhaičan, nego neovisan, hrabar i dovoljno snažan da u dobu informacijskog rata brani ono najvažnije: sposobnost društva da razlikuje stvarnost od manipulacije. U tome nam trebaju oni koji dolaze i oni sa znanjem i integritetom.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

W. B. Yeats

One of the most important economists of the twentieth century, John Maynard Keynes, was a member of the cosmopolitan elite who nonetheless sympathized with those without work and those at the bottom of the existential ladder. Keynes himself, describing what the role of an economist in society ought to be in a text written on the occasion of Alfred Marshall’s death, wrote that a great economist must possess a rare combination of gifts: “He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher — in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man’s nature or his institutions must lie entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood; as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near the earth as a politician.”¹

Lord Robert Skidelsky is often described as “the greatest living Keynesian.” He is the author of several books on Keynes, the most important of which is a three-volume biography and profound analysis of Keynes’s economics. Skidelsky himself is, by training, an economist, a historian, and a philosopher. He has taught at many British and international universities and is a writer, lecturer, and commentator on global affairs. For the purposes of this book, I spoke with Lord Robert Skidelsky in the autumn of 2017 about the questions he considers essential to “thinking about the present in the light of the past, for the sake of the future.”

Does the world have the capacity to find universal solutions or answers to the key challenges of our time? How should we define the very notion of universalism?

In the natural sciences, universalism denotes the existence of laws that apply everywhere and at all times. Such are the laws of nature. The same action under the same conditions always produces the same result. But natural laws are not necessarily the same as the laws of science. Nature behaves according to certain rules, but the laws of science are the consequence of our mental evolution as a species, and they continue to develop. We learn to change our conceptual frameworks and adapt them to what we discover. So, in science, the opposite of universalism would be evolution. The concept of universalism is also applied when we speak about the behavior of our species. When, for example, we say that people are the same everywhere, that equality may arise from similar social experiences, but in any case, limited independent diversity can produce universal patterns of behavior. Two universal characteristics are self-interest and identification with one’s own group. Economists use the first, sociologists the second, to explain human behavior. They say these are universal traits found in all groups and in all periods. Since they are partly contradictory, they can explain most of the conflicts that have haunted human society since its beginnings. In this sense, the opposite of the universal is the historical. History shows people living in different conditions and developing different laws, institutions, and norms of behavior. History shows that societies depend on their own paths and contexts. For example, self-interest may be a natural trait, but different societies have developed very different rules of conduct to deal with it. Some ancient societies discouraged the expression of self-interest, while economists praised such a model as the engine of a state’s wealth creation. Likewise, although identification with one’s own group is universal, different societies are more or less open to foreigners. Much depends on historical experience, which makes it difficult to generalize on the question of openness to migration. This second type of universalism brings us closer to answering what universal values mean. These are values it is good to accept as binding upon ourselves, not as Britons, Germans, Russians, or Chinese, but as human beings trying to live their lives. In that sense, the opposite of universalism is localism or nationalism.

Today there is much more talk about values, that is, about their “preservation.” Do such universal values exist?

We have no compelling proof that they do. If we cite universal documents such as the Declaration of Human Rights, we understand that they were written by people from the West at a time when the West was a kind of world legislator. Although there is evidence of connections across the world in the age of Plato, Zoroaster, Buddha, and Confucius, I doubt that the lists of values composed by Persian, Indian, or Chinese philosophers in their own traditions would have been the same as those in Europe, or that they could even be considered in universal terms. What is therefore regarded today as universal values is part of Western civilization and draws its roots from ancient Greece, the Judeo-Christian heritage, the French Revolution, and the scientific view of the world. The most important element in that galaxy of values is the value of the individual. At the center are individual freedoms, such as freedom of thought and equality before the law. Our moral, political, and legal principles and systems are essentially shaped in order to protect individual freedoms. Universalism is a Western belief, not a universal belief. Today it seems that Europe, as a kind of civilizational center of the world, is dying before our eyes in that sense.

What, in that context, are the greatest challenges of our time?

First, the revolt against universalism within the West itself, which began as a revolt against a specific kind of universalism — globalization. It first appeared in the late 1990s and has since evolved into various forms of populist politics. In Europe and America, a common trend has emerged in what we call identity politics. I think it is crucial to understand why. What is it that people think they have lost, and why do they think they lost it? Above all, it is their sense of belonging to a community. They no longer believe their political leaders and think those leaders hold political ideas different from the ones they themselves would support. The reflex response has been the strengthening of populist movements that are highly traditional, especially in Eastern Europe, with the strong Catholic Church as a fixed point of society. In other parts of Europe, these movements are, in their messaging, almost fascistic, yet everything seems to be tolerated. Americans, meanwhile, ask whether they should continue to bear “the burden of the world.” Everywhere there has been a major loss of manufacturing jobs, and these unemployed workers also believe that the elites have an agenda of their own that takes no account of ordinary people. “Ordinary people” is an expression that appears and reappears ever more often. And while these “ordinary people” increasingly do not vote at all, those who do vote place their trust in those who shout that they will represent “ordinary people.” These political leaders speak a language that the “ordinary person” understands. Because we have lived so long in a closed, separate world, elites genuinely fail to grasp that the language they speak means absolutely nothing. It does not correspond to, nor connect with, the way ordinary people feel about the world around them. Everything is inflamed by anger over the loss of jobs, identity, democracy, sovereignty — against all those forces of economic universalism that sought the complete castration of national states in the name of borderless economic integration. In terms of the curve between individualism and collectivism, we are moving toward a toxic form of collectivism that asserts the demand for cultural identity against the demand of the large and open society.

You mentioned globalization as the form of universalism that accelerated these processes. In what way?

The economy has become global, while politics remains national and local. If you take those as two facts, then you have to improve the efficiency of economies locally and you have to slow globalization down. People must be given time to adapt. And they must be brought into the conversation about policy options far earlier than is currently the case, when it is handled as an after-the-fact firefighting measure. Globalization must be slowed and managed. It was left to the market. By “the market,” many people understand the abstract or entirely particular financial interests of certain elites. And once you continue talking about financial interests, you very quickly find support in populist rhetoric. In that sense, neoliberalism and neoclassical economics created a great mess. In such a system and worldview, there are only individuals; nations and states do not matter. That is the key weakness of that order.

The basic lesson of neoclassical economics is methodological individualism: individuals pursuing only their own interests, while the market is supposed to harmonize everything. Both the national market and the global market, the planetary market. If your analysis contains only individuals, then all the things that connect those individuals to one another, and that are not the market, are unimportant. The individual is the only unit of analysis. And if that is your view of things, you end up helpless in a situation like this. You try restructuring models, but you get nowhere. You remain trapped in the same model and the same way of thinking and acting. If economics and politics drift ever farther apart, real fascism emerges. Unemployment, the restriction of the welfare role of the state, financial crime, and ultimately the global inequality produced by such an economy have also stripped away the democratic veil that had hidden many things from most citizens — or left them unable to understand them. The passionate intensity of populists resonates as a clear message: the elites are selfish, corrupt, and inclined toward criminality. Power must be returned to the people. It is no coincidence that the two greatest political shocks, Trump and Brexit, occurred precisely in the countries that most firmly embraced neoliberal economics.

What solutions are being offered today?

The fact is that today we are all part of the global supply chain. Production has become fragmented across the world, and it seems there is nothing we can do about that. How do we ensure the return of jobs that have moved abroad? The new model being proposed is to strengthen the flexibility and adaptability of labor markets to the inevitable rapid changes in economies and technology. The population in the West is aging. People are being retrained, reskilled. But many simply do not want to be retrained in that way. When they are offered a worse job, they simply do not like it. There is a mantra that this will help the economy and the labor market, but such processes can only be a small part of the comprehensive response we need. If we are unable to create strong global leadership, then regionalization — fragmentation into regions and blocs — is inevitable. Of course, that is already happening. We have partially regionalized economies such as the European Union, East Asia, and Latin America. Within those frameworks, states will try to confine economies within some form of political legitimacy depending on the context. It is very difficult to sustain that broader scope of action. The example of the European Union shows how difficult it is to create political institutions in that sense. On the other hand, in the monetary union, the eurozone, we saw how illegitimate it was in the case of the Greek crisis. To paraphrase my hero Keynes, an international monetary system must be created in which creditors and debtors are much more equal. Why did they give them the money, and who gave them the money? Banks were also seeking short-term profits. When you go deep into the whole problem, you realize there is a great deal of rot in the financial system and in the way it has been allowed to operate without any serious regulation. One of the things I am convinced of is that the project of globalization was deregulation. There was a great deal of economic activity beyond the reach of potential regulation and beyond the knowledge of national governments. I think things in the world in the period ahead will get worse, that we will face many more crises, because we have not done enough to limit the rule of financial markets. A model must be found to keep politics and economics in some kind of synchrony. As both a possible solution and a possible problem, technology is often mentioned. I think it is important to say that it is not inevitable. What drove automation was a simple capitalist logic of cutting costs, making things cheaper under the banner of the common good. I do not know how to confront that coherently. Robotization is happening, but I think that, because we control inventions and their application, we must slow it down, just as we must slow globalization, so that real adaptation can occur rather than new shocks.

We are facing major geopolitical changes. What do they bring?

Global power is shifting from the United States toward China. But China has no desire to take the place of the United States as some kind of universal hegemon. It does not want to turn everyone into Chinese, in the way Americans allegedly wanted to turn everyone into themselves. It wants the respect that comes with its position and culture. It wants a multipolar world in which it is one of the poles. One other country is also very important here, and that is Russia. It too believes in a multipolar world and hopes to use its enormous territorial expanse, natural resources, and still powerful military to balance between the West and China, with “adventures” in its neighborhood. Russia is a hybrid system for which there is no proper name. Is it corporatism, something between capitalism and socialism? What is Putinism? It is neither a full dictatorship, nor fully populist, nor is it a democracy. We lack a credible general term for that kind of system. Trump’s geopolitical and economic views should be seen against a background of disappointment, not through the prism of some ideal moral or economic standards. We have a kind of liberal revolt against Trump, but I think that, as he moves away from populism toward the making of concrete policies, liberals should stop recoiling in disgust or despair and should instead examine his policies — and at the same time examine themselves — in order to “save” that value system. Perhaps Trump is precisely the solution to the crisis of liberalism, rather than the path to its disintegration.

Is there any basis for optimism, and what should we continue fighting for?

Is horror truly the price that must be paid for progress? Evil has often been the driver of good. Without Hitler there would have been no United Nations, no European Union, no decolonization, and no outlawing of racism. But one must not conclude from this that evil is necessary for good to happen. We must not embrace disruptive politics, because we cannot be certain that they will not lead to a new Hitler. The usual explanation is that the system is collapsing because the elites have lost contact with the people. Aristotle says that the distortion of democracy is plutocracy. The more unequal a society becomes, the more the lives and values of the rich drift away from those of “ordinary people.” The rich live in separate, protected communities, enjoying their comfort and conversations which, in that world detached from reality, are decent and acceptable. But it is economics that strikes at the heart of legitimacy, not culture. When the reward for economic progress reaches only those who are already wealthy, the divide between majority and minority cultural values becomes seriously destabilizing. It seems to me that this is precisely what is happening today in the democratic world. The second wave of liberalism represented politically by Roosevelt and the founders of the European Union, and economically by Keynes, was destroyed by the economics of globalization, which was turned into a pursuit of ideal equilibrium through the free flow of capital and goods. In historical terms, the meaning of today’s populist nationalism is clear: it is the arrival of another kind of fascism. I use the term generically, in the sense of a semi-criminal political revolt against the existing norms of social life. It is clearly recognizable in its rhetoric of excess, also manifested in the phenomenon of so-called fake news. And yet there is no doubt that, regardless of the West having lost its dominance, Western values have penetrated deeply into the value systems of societies that the West has “opened up” between the sixteenth century and the present day. That opening continues. You cannot have cross-border economic integration without developing common standards, regulations, shared principles of business conduct, and even some basic sense of community and mutual sympathy. In both politics and culture, the growing interdependence of the world should, for example, compel rulers to treat their own citizens in ways that are also acceptable to their neighbors. We saw in the refugee crisis that this was not the case. In such cases, there should be effective international mechanisms of regulation, just as the International Criminal Court in The Hague was created. Second, science is universal. There is no specifically Chinese or Russian science. Attempts in the past to create Soviet or Nazi science failed. Through its clear rules of proof rather than falsification, science provides a kind of objective standard for assessing the truth of claims and beliefs. It compensates, at least partly, for the absence of a truly universal ethics and is the last barrier against the mass gullibility nourished by social media. Third, we all share a common destiny as a species whose activities directly affect the survival of our planet. Of course, we may not survive the challenges of our future. But if we are to meet them with hope and success, we must learn to make the most of our common inheritance. We must learn how to show respect for everyone’s identity while insisting on the supremacy of our shared identity as human beings. Otherwise, we will continue to fight and wage war against one another, as we have done so many times in history.

People who live with proximity to history absorb it into the routine.

When Cyprus took over EU presidency in January, College of Commissioners walked along the Green Line in Nicosia, last divided capital in the world they say. “A moving experience”, that’s how Ursula von der Leyen called it, saying that a comprehensive, fair and lasting solution for Cyprus and for all Cypriots remains an absolute priority for the EU.

This evening, EU leaders will gather in Cyprus with multilayered crisis looming. “First, we must discuss our response to this rapidly evolving situation,” European Council President António Costa said in his invitation letter. “This includes Europe’s contribution to de-escalation and peace in the region, as well as to the freedom of navigation.”

The day before the informal EU summit I walked the Green line in Nicosia.

An unusual silence can be heard along this line that divides Cyprus. A silence that, however easily tourists cross the checkpoint, reminds you that in between lie lost lives, memories, destinies. Silence that makes you aware about our fragility and insecurity.

The city does not let you romanticise the European project either. It reminds you that history was unfortunately never over, that borders never vanished, that peace in Europe has always been less complete than many preferred to believe.

It reminds you, too, that politics is no longer experienced in the same register by those who govern and those who are governed.

Ledra is not only a crossing between south and north. It is a crossing between stories Europe tells itself as EU leaders are gathering in Cyprus after a Shahed drone flew from neighbouring Lebanon toward the British base on the island.

As with many of the world’s walls, wires, dividing lines and demilitarised zones I have visited, there are always those who want to paint over them, those who speak of peace. The same smells, but different worlds on each side

“Which summit?” a waitress asked me near the checkpoint on Ledra Street. “We have our own problems”…

Elections await Cyprus in May. The trend we saw in the European elections , YouTuber Fidias, who won majority of Cipriot votes then, could become a decisive factor in already divided Cypriot politics. As in Europe’s too.

Wars close to home, bleeding into our politics through energy, migration, security and fear. Voters angrier. Attention fractured. Meaning harder to hold.

And here, in Nicosia, all of that is visible in miniature. The division line through the city. The summit people don’t care about or don’t understand.

The YouTuber-politician starring like a dispatch from the changed future.

Before the motorcades come and the language of urgent consensus steps in, it is worth standing on Ledra crossing for a while and just listening. That may be the most unsettling thing of all.

The silence.

Donald Trump’s latest Truth Social performance felt like a collapse. First came Truth post with the attack on Pope Leo: “terrible,” “weak on crime and foreign policy,” supposedly unfit to speak about war or morality. It followed Pope’s condemnation of Trump’s threat against Iran as “truly unacceptable,” part of his broader insistence that civilians and entire peoples cannot be treated as expendable. Then came the AI image of Trump as Americanized Jesus. Vulgar but revealing. Who knows how that prompt looked like? But, the nervouseness is obvious. Those who want to present themselves as Gods on Earth, at one poiny can no longer tolerate moral limits.

What makes this moment more than another Trump outrage is that it is starting to exposes the exhaustion of a political style that has spent a decade dressing up as Christian destiny. From MAGA in the United States to Orbán in Hungary, Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Putin’s own civilizational Orthodox theater, the script was the same: nation as altar, leader as redeemer, cruelty as strength, Christianity emptied of mercy and refilled with hierarchy, punishment and spectacle. Pope Francis started, and now, first American Pope, continued to dismantle this concept that changed both politics and christian communities around the world. The concept that started to change the minds of christians who started to believe that politicans like Trump can really be the Second Coming. Or they were made to believe so.

Pope Leo’s rebuke cuts straight through the fraud. He has spoken in the language of conscience, restraint and the protection of human life.

There is also a darker intellectual current behind all this. Peter Thiel in Rome, lecturing on the Antichrist while positioning himself against the pope’s moral language on technology, war and human dignity. Thiel-MAGA universe recasts limits themselves. The chosen ones. On Mars. Political theology and raw manipulative politics in which Christianity is twisted into a defense of hierarchy, domination and technological might.

Is this mix of hallucinatory spectacle politics and twisted Christianity amplified by algorithm declining ? Maybe. Orbán’s defeat in Hungary suggests that the strongman-Christian brand is not invincible, even after years of corruption, media capture and messianic rhetoric. That does not mean this style of politics disappears. Movements like these rarely collapse gracefully, they just mutate. Still, there is something telling in the timing. As one of the emblematic figures of “illiberal Christianity” falls in Budapest, Trump answers a pope with AI Christ cosplay. It does not look confident. It looks decadent. Decadence is by definition, state of moral and any other decline characterized by excessive self-indulgence and corruption. It implies a "falling away" from a higher standard. Where do we go from here, that is the question?