Still Radical: A Vision for the Decade Ahead

Six weeks ago, we began this campaign with a question: what values are considered controversial today? We asked when solidarity became controversial. When empathy became politically suspicious. When the belief that everyone deserves dignity began to require ideological justification.

Over the weeks that followed, our colleagues, partners and alumni from across Southeast Europe offered their own answers. We talked about dignified work and workers' rights. About democracy and civic mobilization. About protecting nature and ensuring that its resources serve the public good. About equality, solidarity and cooperation. And, importantly, we heard from people who have translated these principles into political, professional and civic action.

There is no single answer to the question with which we started. But there is a conclusion I take from these conversations: social democratic values are not relics of a past political era They are becoming more necessary because the world around us is changing, and our task for the next decade is to prove that social democratic values are essential to solving problems awaiting us.

A region at a turning point

Southeast Europe enters the second half of this decade in a profoundly different political environment from the one in which Dialogue Southeast Europe was established in Sarajevo in 2015. Since then, migration has continuously reshaped societies and remains one of the most polarizing topics in European politics. The climate transition keeps reshaping economies and communities, but more recently intensified struggles over critical resources. Democratic institutions continue to face pressures from outside and from within, while political forces once regarded as belonging to the far-right fringe increasingly influence mainstream debates. We have faced one of the largest modern crises with the COVID-19 pandemic. Since 2015, conflicts have intensified, war returning to Europe as well, both literally and as increased geopolitical competition. Finally, the European enlargement has regained political urgency while dragging its feet at the same time. 

At the EU-Western Balkans Summit in Tivat earlier this year, European leaders again described accession of the Western Balkans as a geopolitical investment in Europe's peace, stability and security. The Growth Plan is already creating forms of gradual integration and providing new financial incentives for reforms, while economic convergence has returned to the centre of the enlargement conversation. For those of us who have spent years working towards the European integration of this region, these developments are indeed welcome.

Yet these difficult circumstances also compel us to ask an underlying question: what kind of societies are we building along the way?

We still believe and work toward a European future. However, can a European future in which people remain unable to afford housing, young workers see emigration as their most reliable route towards economic security, public services deteriorate, inequalities deepen, and democratic institutions lose public confidence be considered desirable? European integration must therefore be not only geopolitical, institutional and economic; it must also be social.

Democracy must deliver

Perhaps the most important lesson we take with us at this point of reflecting over our own work is that democracy cannot survive indefinitely as a promise about values and deliverables while people's everyday experience tells them that the economy and political system do not work for them. 

People experience democracy at work, when they can organize and bargain collectively without fear. They experience it when losing a job does not mean losing basic security. They experience it when a young family can find somewhere affordable to live; when a child receives good education regardless of their parents' income; when healthcare is accessible; when women participate equally in economic and political life; and when citizens can challenge those in power without intimidation.

Across the European Union, housing has emerged as one of the most serious social challenges of our time. Across Southeast Europe, demographic decline and outward migration continue to raise an even more fundamental question: what makes people believe that they can build a future where they live?

We will not be able to answer that question through economic growth alone. We have to consider  distribution of prosperity, quality of work, strong public services, affordable housing, social protection and the ability of ordinary people to influence decisions affecting their lives. It is part of what gives democracy meaning.

The green transition must also be an inclusive transition

The same principle applies to another transformation already reshaping our region.

Europe's demand for critical raw materials is increasing as it seeks to accelerate the green transition, strengthen strategic autonomy and reduce external dependencies. The Western Balkans possess resources that will inevitably form part of this debate, but the question is who decides, who benefits and who carries the risks.

Over the past weeks, our campaign has highlighted how environmental struggles can become democratic struggles. Communities demanding transparency, participation and protection of their environment are not obstacles to development. They are citizens exercising basic democratic rights. A genuinely progressive green transition cannot reproduce the inequalities of the economic model it is supposed to replace.

It must create decent jobs. It must respect communities. It must protect common resources. It must distribute benefits fairly. And it must recognise that environmental sustainability without social justice will eventually lose democratic legitimacy.

We need cooperation in an age of fragmentation

The problems facing this region do not stop at national borders, and neither should our answers. This has been our guiding principle since Dialogue Southeast Europe was established.

Climate change, labor migration, disinformation, energy security, and economic inequality all quite literally cross borders. But so do the political movements seeking to weaken democratic institutions. This is why regional cooperation has to be built between trade unions, political actors, researchers, journalists, civil society organizations, activists, and new generations of leaders.

Over the past ten years, some of the most important moments in our work have happened when people from across the region discovered that what appeared to be an isolated national problem was, in fact, a shared challenge.

Those connections matter even more in an increasingly fragmented political environment.

The temptation in uncertain times is to retreat: behind borders, identities and supposedly simple answers. But Southeast Europe's history should make us particularly aware of where the politics of permanent division can lead. Cooperation must therefore remain our preferred choice. It allows us to address our differences without turning them into conflict.

Being progressive requires more than defending the past

For social democrats, however, there is also a challenge closer to home. We cannot respond to political change simply by defending institutions and achievements created by previous generations. Many of those achievements are worth defending: workers' rights, social protection, democratic institutions, gender equality, European cooperation... But nostalgia is not a political program.

A movement committed to progress has to be capable of reinventing progress under new conditions. 

The next ten years

When Dialogue Southeast Europe was created ten years ago, its premise was clear: democratic consolidation, social and economic justice, and lasting peace in Southeast Europe require regional solutions.

I believe that premise remains correct.

But the context has changed, and therefore our work must continue to evolve with it.

In the decade ahead, our role must be to create spaces in which progressive ideas can be developed, contested and translated into action. To connect people who would otherwise remain separated by borders, institutions or generations. To support those defending democratic space. To make social justice an integral part of European integration. To elevate workers' voices in economic transformation. To connect climate policy with fairness. To strengthen progressive approaches to peace and security. And to help a new generation of political and civic actors imagine what social democracy can develop into. This requires something from us as well.

We must listen more carefully. We must question assumptions that have guided our own work. We must create room for disagreement within the progressive community. And we must prioritize everyday concerns of people whose confidence in democratic politics cannot be taken for granted.

Because values only matter politically when people can recognize them in their own lives.

Ten years is an achievement, but it is not a destination. When we started this campaign, we wrote that if fairness, solidarity, dignity and democracy are considered radical, then perhaps we are still radical.

Six weeks later, I would add: Being "still radical" should mean remaining ambitious about the future.

Ambitious to believe that work can provide dignity rather than insecurity. That economic transformation can benefit the many rather than the few. That Europe can enlarge without losing sight of its social promise. That environmental protection and prosperity do not have to be opposites. That our societies can disagree without becoming enemies. That peace is something we actively build, not simply the absence of war. And that democratic politics can still offer people a credible reason to hope.

None of these ambitions should be radical.

But if they are, we will continue to stand by them.

And we will continue working with those across Southeast Europe who do the same.