Forty-five thousand, not leaving, but building elsewhere

In the queue at passport control at Nikola Tesla Airport, three weeks ago, at 5:40 in the morning, I overheard two sons seeing their father off to Berlin: one said to the other, “Dad isn’t moving, he’s just going away for a little longer.” The father, a man of around fifty-five with a single suitcase, nodded as if confirming it. The son who said it was not lying. He was simply translating, into Serbian, a phenomenon that has a different name in the official statistics.

OECD and UN estimates, cited by the Umbrella Organisation of Youth of Serbia (KOMS) in its annual reports, say that each year between 15,700 and 49,000 people leave Serbia, while the more frequently quoted midpoint stands at about 45,000. Bloomberg Adria published an analysis according to which the cumulative annual loss to the Serbian economy, when one adds the lost GDP contribution and investment in the education of those who leave, runs between 2.5 and 3 billion euros. All of this is true. But the numbers do not explain why a son in the passport queue says “he’s just going away for a little longer”, while his father holds a one-way ticket to the same flight.

The reason is sociological, not economic. In post-socialist societies that have gone through dismantling (Bolcic would call it “the disintegration of society”, after the title of the anthology he co-edited with Andjelka Milic in 2002), the language we use about emigration does not follow the reality of emigration. We have no word for mass permanent emigration. We have a word for “gastarbeiter”, for “pecalbar” (seasonal labourer), for “exchange student”, for “professional development”. All these words are temporary. They presume return. The word “emigrant” (iseljenik) is used very rarely in Serbian public space, because using it would require admitting that the process is mass, permanent, and not amenable to standard policy correction.

When numbers stop being just numbers

Look at the structure of the departure. KOMS research repeats: more than half of young people in Serbia plan to leave the country. Women leave in slightly greater numbers than men. The largest destination is Germany, then the United States, Austria, Switzerland, Canada. Nearly one in five emigrants holds a higher or advanced education. Adding it all up, you get a profile that economic statistics call “human capital” and that sociology calls a “demographic turning point”. The difference between the two is not terminological, it is consequential. Statistics can be compensated for by fiscal measures, a demographic turning point cannot.

A second layer of the problem is institutional. The Employment Strategy of the Republic of Serbia for the period 2021-2026, adopted by the Government of Serbia, foresees that 25,740 unemployed persons in 2026 will be covered by financial measures of active employment policy. That is approximately half of those who leave the country each year. Active employment policy, in principle, does not stand against emigration, it is mostly turned towards the existing domestic labour market. The strategy does not speak of emigration as a market on which one is losing competition. It speaks of unemployment as a problem to be addressed, as if the departure of 45,000 people a year were not, in itself, a form of vanishing unemployment.

The Slovenian sociologist Rastko Mocnik once wrote about “transitional rationality”, a concept describing how states in the post-socialist transition form policies that do not concern real conditions but tables. The table of Serbia’s active employment policy is tidy. The numbers add up. The fact that those numbers do not include the 45,000 people a year who have solved unemployment in a way that costs no one in the ministry (except in the same queue at the airport) does not appear as a problem of the strategy. The strategy presumes that whoever leaves ceases to be its obligation. That is technocratically accurate, sociologically irresponsible.

Now the counter-argument, which I must bring in myself. There is a reading according to which the emigration of young people from Serbia is a normal process of European integration: people are free to move, the Serbian labour market is unable to absorb all generations, and in Germany one earns four times what one earns in Belgrade. By that logic, the state should not experience emigration as a loss, but as an individual choice by individuals exercising the right of free movement. I share that logic partly, but only partly. Free movement presumes that there is a possibility of returning to a country worth returning to. If 86 per cent of young people (KOMS, 2024 survey) state that they would return only “if the system changes”, then this is not a free choice, but a practically coerced choice. The difference is legal and ethical.

I return to the passport queue. The father with one suitcase passed through the doors at 6:15, the son who said “he’s just going away for a little longer” remained with his other brother, both looking at the glass wall separating the departure area from arrivals. That glass wall, phenomenologically, sociology cannot describe. What is seen through it is not a world, but its disappearance. A father who leaves is not an economic statistic, he is a hole in the measure of how far the home society loses the capacity to speak about itself without the fiction of “temporary departure”.

What follows from all this. Not fiscal measures, not new family aid packages (though perhaps those too). What follows is one thing no government wants: linguistic honesty. If we were to start using the word “emigrant” in public space where today we write “young people temporarily leaving for the sake of education”, we would face the phenomenon as it is, not as the phenomenon we would like it to be. After that small linguistic change, it is possible that policies would also become different. Without it, the figure of 45,000 a year remains what it is, a number repeated once every three months, while reality goes to Berlin with one suitcase and a son who translates.