Student Protest on the Square: A Generation That Has Stopped Believing

On Wednesday at noon, on Republic Square, I walked past a group of about three hundred students. They were standing facing the pavement in front of the National Theatre, with their backs to the building that is the object of their grievance. There were no slogans, no loudspeaker, no faces offered to the cameras.

I stood for three minutes and tried to reconstruct what I was seeing. The silence was dense, not as an absence of sound but as the presence of something that is not sound. A young woman of about twenty-one was holding in her hands an empty sheet of white paper. There was no slogan on it, no accusation, no appeal. Just a blank sheet, raised to chest height.

I learned later that this was one of the ritualised forms of protest that had appeared in the faculties this spring.

A pivot to the sociology of consent

I pivot from the scene to the sociology of these forms of public exposure. The British philosopher and cultural theorist Mark Fisher, in the book “Capitalist Realism” (Zero Books, 2009; Serbian translation, Faculty of Media and Communications, 2016), formulated a concept he called reflexive impotence. Fisher defined it roughly like this:

Reflexive impotence is not indifference. Students know that things are not good. But they also know that there is nothing they can do about it, because no visible alternative exists within the system presented to them as the only possible one.

Fisher wrote about British youth after the 2008 financial crisis. We are far from that context, but the structure of feeling, as Fisher put it, is similar. The generation that grew up inside Serbia’s transitional society inherited a picture of political life as a space in which nothing fundamental changes, only the redistribution of offices.

When I see three hundred students with blank pieces of paper, I do not see a sociological pathology. I see a generation that has internalised the knowledge that words no longer carry weight, that slogans become a commodity bought and sold on the media shelf in twenty-four hours. The blank paper is, in that logic, the only utterance that cannot yet be commodified.

A transition that never ended

The Serbian sociologist Marina Blagojevic-Huson, in the collection of essays “Women in Serbia and Transition” (Filozofija i drustvo journal, 2008) and later in “Mapping Misogyny in Serbia” (AZIN, 2005), documented something that is central to today’s student generation. The Serbian transition was not a historical event with a beginning and an end; it became a permanent condition of society.

A generation born around 2003 or 2004, today in the lecture halls, has never experienced a state that might be called normality. For them, the provisional is the permanent condition:

• job insecurity is the norm, not the crisis
• emigration is a date in the diary, not a decision in a life
• the link between work and the chance of buying a flat has broken
• the link between education and social mobility has weakened
• politics is a media genre, not a place one can act on

In that structure, the classical political protest, with slogans, leaders and clear demands, becomes suspect to them. Not because they do not care, but because in their experience such a protest has always ended with someone else instrumentalising it. The silence and the blank paper are an attempt to draw a line that the political professionals cannot cross.

The counter-argument from the older generation

Here a counter-argument must come, one often heard in the media and in the conversations of people my age. By that logic, the student protests are naive, inconsistent, without a clear programme. Older commentators ask: if they are not calling for a resignation, if they are not calling for elections, if they are not calling for specific measures, what are they really asking for.

The argument is sincere but structurally deaf. It assumes politics is a space of negotiation between demands and decisions, which is a twentieth-century model. In the twenty-first century, particularly in the post-socialist context, that link has broken. A government can ignore any demand because it does not answer to voters in the classical way. Media can hollow out any slogan because in twenty-four hours it is recycled into its opposite.

The young know this from experience. The old know it intellectually but not emotionally, because they grew up in a world where politics was still something that happened. The difference is generational, not moral.

Are they passive or did they grow up before us

I return to Wednesday at noon, to Republic Square, to the student with the blank paper. After the protest, I approached her and asked what the paper meant. She replied, without irony, with complete calm:

It means I will not write the thing you can use later. When I know what I want, I will say it. Until then, this is the sentence.

I stood silent for a few moments. Later I realised that her sentence was sociologically more precise than any analysis I could have written. She was not asking for concessions. She was marking the space within which negotiation could begin. The difference between the two is the difference between politics and post-politics, as Fisher defined it.

The question that stayed with me as I walked back to the newsroom, which I share with those who have read this far, runs roughly like this. Is the generation that today holds blank papers passive, as its commentators say, or has it grown up faster than we are prepared to admit. And, the harder sociological question, is their silence in fact the first honest political utterance spoken in the Serbian public sphere in decades.