A Re-examination of the Position of the Student Movement in Serbia

Abstract

The idea of the ‘end of history’, which was launched at the beginning of the last decade of the twentieth century, more or less proclaimed the beginning of a conflict-free epoch that would be concomitant with the introduction of undisputed economic and political liberalism.¹ The experience of the collapse of the East European system of real-socialism meant that it would no longer be possible to imagine a world that was radically better than the present one, nor a future which would not be a capitalist one. Due to the escalation of armed conflicts, motivated by nationalism in the former Yugoslavia, this area became the European exception to those predictions of entering a period of eternal peace created by the free market system. However, when the conflicts were over and the regimes which had once led and inspired them had been overthrown, representatives of the economic and political interests of the leading Western governments optimistically concluded that the ‘end of history’ had finally arrived in the region. In other words, the situation had matured enough to speed up the process of the realisation of those transitional obligations which had been delayed due to the unregulated business conditions that had arisen from the wars alongside the politically unstable systems that had been put in place.