{"id":14697,"date":"2026-07-09T10:10:23","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T08:10:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sbunker.org\/?p=14697"},"modified":"2026-07-09T11:07:30","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T09:07:30","slug":"we-have-a-state-we-are-not-yet-citizens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sbunker.org\/sr\/opinion\/we-have-a-state-we-are-not-yet-citizens\/","title":{"rendered":"We Have a State. We Are Not Yet Citizens"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2008 we declared a country into being. The harder half of independence, becoming the kind of people who can live together under our own rules, is still unfinished. <\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Three scenes <\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Lately three things have lodged themselves in my head:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The most recent is a video. The Municipality of Ferizaj\u00a0posted it to social media<\/a>: footage from a security camera of a man on \u2018Ahmet Ka\u00e7iku\u2019 street, methodically breaking and pulling out of the ground the young trees the town had just planted there. The municipality attached to it a question that is really the question of this whole essay. Until when, it asked, will we become conscious enough to protect and care for public property, for the public good? It said it had reported the man to the authorities so that he could be investigated and prosecuted for what it called an ugly and criminal act against public property. A town reduced to posting security footage of its own uprooted saplings, pleading with its residents to stop destroying what it plants for them: that is a small portrait of where we are.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The second I did not so much read as see. In one of the newest apartment buildings in Prishtina, the kind that is supposed to mean we have arrived, the residents have taken to defending their parking spaces by hand. A chain across the spot, a cone, a chair dragged out to hold the place, and, in bold letters on the asphalt and the walls, the words\u00a0do not park here<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The third is old. It is a clipping from\u00a0Rilindja<\/em>, from the socialist years, under a headline that reads like a proverb:\u00a0E jep gishtin, ta rr\u00ebmbejn\u00eb dor\u00ebn.<\/em>\u00a0Give them a finger and they take the whole hand. The article complains, in the indignant tone of a neighbour who has had enough, that the usurpation of basements has become a fashion. Citizens were quietly seizing the shared basements of socially owned apartment blocks and turning them into private workshops. The detail that stays with me is almost too perfect: in one block, someone had opened a welding shop in a basement that was not his and was running his power tools off the building\u2019s common electricity meter, so that his private profit arrived every month as a line on his neighbours\u2019 shared bill, lumped in with the hallway lights and the lift. One man helped himself to what belonged to everyone, and everyone paid for it together.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Decades and a whole political order separate these scenes. In between we threw off an oppressor’s rule and gained a state of our own. And yet the man tearing out the saplings, the man guarding his parking space with a chain, and the welder in the basement are, I think, the same person. One destroys the common good, one hoards a piece of it, one quietly steals it; but all three are reading their situation correctly. They live in a shared space that nobody trusts to be governed fairly, and in such a space only a few moves make sense. You seize it, you wall it off, or, if the shared thing brings you no advantage, you simply tear it out. The one option almost never available is the one we keep waiting for, which is cooperation. Cooperation requires believing that the other person will reciprocate, and that belief is exactly what is missing.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2008 we did something genuinely difficult: we declared a state into existence and, against considerable odds, made it stick. But a state is not the same thing as a society of citizens, and we are discovering, slowly and a little shamefully, that we built the first and assumed the second would follow. It has not followed. We litter the country we fought for. We smoke indoors under a law we ourselves passed. We let our children sit in classrooms colder than a refrigerator and we do not riot. We occupy the public realm as though it were enemy territory or no man\u2019s land, never as though it were ours. The state was the easy half of independence. The citizen is the half we have not finished.<\/span><\/p>\n

A commons no one trusts<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The cleanest way to name what links the basement, the parking space, and the uprooted saplings is to call it a problem of the commons. The phrase comes from\u00a0Garrett Hardin<\/a>, who in 1968 asked his readers to picture a pasture open to all. Each herder, acting perfectly rationally, adds one more animal to his flock, because he keeps all the benefit of that animal while the cost of overgrazing is shared across everyone. Every herder reasons the same way, and so the pasture is destroyed by the sum of individually sensible decisions. Freedom in a commons, Hardin concluded, brings ruin to all.<\/span><\/p>\n

For a long time this was taken as a law of nature, and it produced a tidy political menu: if people cannot manage what they share, then either the state must take it over or it must be carved into private property. Both answers assume the same thing about us, that we are the herders, incapable of restraint, and that something external must save us from ourselves.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then\u00a0Elinor Ostrom<\/a>\u00a0spent a career looking at actual commons, mountain pastures in Switzerland, irrigation systems in Spain and the Philippines, fisheries, forests, and found that Hardin\u2019s law was not a law at all. Neither the state nor the market, she showed, reliably keeps a shared resource alive; and communities of ordinary people have governed commons for centuries through arrangements that resemble neither. What the cases that worked had in common was not better people but better machinery: clear boundaries about who belongs and who decides; rules made by the people who actually live with them; monitoring done by the users themselves rather than by some distant inspector; sanctions that begin small and escalate, so that a first offence meets a quiet word rather than a fine; and cheap, local ways to settle the disputes that are bound to arise. None of this is heroic. It is the dull, patient apparatus by which a group of strangers who share a stairwell becomes a community that can govern a stairwell.<\/span><\/p>\n

That apparatus is what we do not have, and the Ferizaj video shows the hole where it should be. A town plants trees and a man pulls them out, and between those two acts there is nothing: no neighbour who will say something, no local arena where the matter could be settled, no graduated response short of a criminal complaint. So the municipality does the only two things left to it. It films, and it calls the police. Our parking lots and basements and schoolyards are not abused because Kosovars are uniquely selfish; that is the comfortable, self-hating explanation, and it is wrong. They are abused because we never built the small institutions that make restraint reasonable. The man with the chain is not a bad neighbour. He is a rational herder in a pasture with no rules, no monitor he trusts, and no arena where a quarrel over a parking space could be resolved short of a shouting match. Strip away the institutions and his chain is the only sensible thing to do. The question is not why he behaves like that. The question is why, seventeen years into statehood, we still have not built the institutions that would let him stop.<\/span><\/p>\n

The weapons we learned under occupation<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

To answer that, you have to reach back further than 2008, and here I have to return to something I wrote nearly a decade ago.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2017, in\u00a0Prishtina Insight<\/a>, I borrowed a phrase from the American political scientist Edward Banfield to describe us:\u00a0amoral familism<\/em>. Banfield coined it in the 1950s, after months in a poor village in southern Italy where he watched people behave as though one rule governed all of life: maximise the short-term advantage of your own nuclear family, and assume that everyone else is doing exactly the same. In such a society no one works for the common good unless paid to, no one trusts the motives of anyone who claims to, and the public sphere is abandoned to officials because officials are the only people whose job it is to care. I argued then that this described Kosovo with uncomfortable precision. I still think it does.<\/span><\/p>\n

But amoral familism is a description, not a cause. It tells you how we behave; it does not tell you why we learned to. And the why, I have come to believe, is written into the centuries before the state was ours.<\/span><\/p>\n

James Scott<\/a>, studying peasants who lived under landlords and states they had no power to confront directly, named what subordinated people do instead of open revolt. He called them the\u00a0weapons of the weak<\/em>: foot-dragging, feigned compliance, quiet evasion, helping yourself to what you can, pretending not to understand the rule you are breaking. These are not the gestures of cowards. Scott\u2019s point is that they are often the most effective resistance available to people who cannot win a direct fight: undramatic, uncoordinated, deniable, and, multiplied across a whole population, capable of wrecking the plans of those who rule them. The historian Marc Bloch said the great uprisings were flashes in the pan beside the patient, silent struggles by which rural communities defended themselves. The weapons of the weak are that patient, silent struggle.<\/span><\/p>\n

For most of our history, the state was the landlord. It was Ottoman; then it was Belgrade\u2019s; in the 1990s it was Milo\u0161evi\u0107\u2019s; and toward all of them the rational, even honourable, posture was evasion. To cheat that state of its taxes, to occupy and repurpose its buildings, to work around its rules, to build your own order in the gaps it left: none of this was delinquency. It was survival, and at its height it was heroism. In the 1990s we turned the weapons of the weak into something close to a second government, with schools in private living rooms, a parallel health system, a whole shadow state funded by a diaspora that taxed itself. We became, out of necessity, extraordinarily good at organising against the state. What we never had the chance to learn was how to be it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why we could build a shadow state but not a parking lot<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

This is the paradox I cannot get out of my head, and it is the one I half-noticed in 2017 without naming. I wrote then<\/a>\u00a0that Kosovars had organised brilliantly against Milo\u0161evi\u0107 in the 1990s and then sank into apathy after 1999, and I treated the contrast as a disappointment, a falling-off. I no longer think it is a falling-off. I think it is a clue.<\/span><\/p>\n

How can a people run an illegal parallel education system under a police state, financed by hundreds of thousands of strangers sending money home, an act of collective trust on an almost unimaginable scale, and then prove unable to agree on who parks where in a building they all own? The capacity for collective action is plainly there. We have done far harder things, under far worse conditions, than organizing a car park. So the explanation cannot be that we are incapable of cooperating.<\/span><\/p>\n

The explanation, I think, is that occupation taught us to cooperate against, and only against. Resistance hands you an enemy, and an enemy is the cheapest and most powerful source of solidarity there is. When the schools were ours against theirs, every parent who hid a\u00a0classroom in a back room<\/a>\u00a0was part of something obvious and shared; the meaning was supplied by the oppressor. Citizenship offers nothing of the kind. There is no enemy in a parking dispute. There is no Belgrade behind the cold radiator. There are only neighbours, and the unglamorous, enemy-less work of cooperating with them for no heroic reason at all. That is a different muscle, and it is precisely the muscle that a long training in resistance never builds, because resistance is cooperation with the enemy supplied, and citizenship is cooperation with the enemy removed.<\/span><\/p>\n

V\u00e1clav Havel understood the inner posture this leaves behind. In his\u00a0essay<\/a>\u00a0on life under a regime no one believed in, he describes a greengrocer who puts the slogan \u201cWorkers of the world, unite!\u201d in his shop window, not because he means it, but because it is what one does to be left alone. The real message of the sign, Havel writes, is not about workers at all; it is: \u201cI am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.\u201d Everyone performs the ritual, no one believes it, and by performing it everyone keeps the system standing. The crucial thing Havel saw is that the line between the system and its victims does not run between groups of people. It runs through each person, who is at once a victim of the lie and a small pillar of it.<\/span><\/p>\n

We have removed the regime but kept the greengrocer\u2019s posture toward the public realm. We still treat the state as a thing to be appeased, evaded, and quietly milked, a window in which we hang the slogan of citizenship without meaning it. Havel\u2019s name for the alternative was\u00a0living within the truth<\/em>: refusing the ritual, behaving as if the public realm were real and ours. The state was the part of independence we could declare in an afternoon. Living within the truth of self-rule, inhabiting the country as owners rather than as its clever survivors, is the part no declaration can hand us.<\/span><\/p>\n

The cold classroom<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

If you want to see what the unfinished half of independence costs, do not look at the parliament. Look at where our children spend a third of their day.<\/span><\/p>\n

This month the\u00a0Atlas Institute<\/a>\u00a0did something no one in Kosovo had done before: it combined the national record of how schools are heated with real-time sensor data from inside Prishtina classrooms, tens of thousands of daily readings of temperature and carbon dioxide. The findings should have been a scandal. In December, more than half of the monitored classroom-days were colder than eighteen degrees, the minimum the World Health Organization considers safe even for a home; some rooms were recorded at two, three, five degrees, children in their coats in spaces barely warmer than the street. In the worst school the December average was under thirteen degrees. Outside it is no better: at the sensor by the Bill Clinton statue, traffic-borne nitrogen dioxide breached the WHO\u2019s annual guideline on more than four days in five, and on dozens of winter days it pushed past the very ceiling the instrument can measure, which means the true figure was higher still. Step back from the sensors and the national picture closes in: by the most cited estimate, around ninety-nine percent of Kosovo\u2019s children routinely breathe air dirtier than the WHO\u2019s limit. Forty percent of our households cannot keep their homes warm, the highest share in the Western Balkans.<\/span><\/p>\n

These are our children, in our schools, breathing our air, in our state. And we are not enraged. That is the fact that should stop us cold. A society that once funded a parallel school system out of its own pocket to defy Milo\u0161evi\u0107 cannot summon the collective anger to demand a warm, breathable classroom from a ministry and municipality it elected.<\/span><\/p>\n

Amoral familism explains the silence exactly. The cold classroom is not felt as a public outrage; it is felt as a private problem with a private solution. You buy your own child a warmer coat. If you can afford it, you move him to a private school, and note that a quarter of children in pre-school are already in private hands. You put an air purifier behind your own closed window. You solve it for your own, and you assume everyone else is doing the same for theirs, and so the shared thing, the classroom, the air, the commons, is quietly abandoned by everyone at once. The cold classroom is the welder\u2019s basement again: a cost that one party\u2019s neglect socializes onto all, paid collectively on a shared meter, while each of us privately optimizes a way out.<\/span><\/p>\n

And here is the detail from the Atlas report that should haunt us most. The sensors already exist. The data is already being collected. What is missing, the report says plainly, is any obligation to publish it, and anyone insisting that it be acted upon. The instrument of accountability is installed and switched on. The citizen who would read the dial and bang on the ministry\u2019s door is the part that is not yet there.<\/span><\/p>\n

How a citizen is made<\/span> <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

So how do we become that citizen? Not, I think, in the way we keep hoping, by electing the right saviour to fix the commons from above. That hope is itself a symptom of the disease; it is the amoral familist\u2019s faith that the public sphere is someone else\u2019s paid responsibility. Ostrom\u2019s whole body of work is a warning that commons are almost never rescued from the top. They are governed into health from within, by the people who share them, through exactly the small machinery I described: boundaries, self-monitoring, sanctions that are local and graduated, cheap ways to resolve disputes.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is slow, and we should be honest that it is slow. Ralf Dahrendorf, watching Eastern Europe climb out of communism, offered a sobering arithmetic: you can write a new constitution in six months and reform an economy in six years, but the civil society beneath them takes something closer to sixty. We are roughly one generation into our sixty years. The state arrived in an afternoon in February 2008. The citizens are still being made, one residents\u2019 meeting, one parents\u2019 council, one un-grabbed parking space, one tree left standing at a time.<\/span><\/p>\n

The harder half<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

I keep returning to the question the municipality of Ferizaj attached to its video. Until when? It is the right question, and it is also, quietly, the wrong one, because it is addressed to someone else, to those irresponsible others who will not behave. The harder version is the one we have to ask in the first person. Until when will we, each of us, treat the public realm as ours?<\/span><\/p>\n

We have the state. We have the buildings, modern and finished, the proof of a country that arrived. What we do not yet have is the thing that would make the chain on the parking space and the camera over the saplings unnecessary: the shared, boring, trustworthy agreement among neighbours that turns a contested space into a governed one. The state was the part others could recognize, a flag, a seat at the table, a line on the map. The citizen is the part no one can recognize into being for us, because it is not a status but a practice, and it is hardest precisely where it matters most, in the enemy-less, unheroic cooperation that occupation never asked of us and freedom now demands. Our children are breathing the evidence that we have not finished. They are sitting in their coats, in the cold, in the country we built for them, waiting for us to become the people who could keep them warm.<\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2008 we declared a country into being. The harder half of independence, becoming the kind of people who can live together under our own rules, is still unfinished. Three scenes Lately three things have lodged themselves in my head: The most recent is a video. The Municipality of Ferizaj\u00a0posted it to social media: footage […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":384,"featured_media":14698,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[664,624,1634,1081],"ppma_author":[378],"class_list":["post-14697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","tag-kosovo","tag-kryesore","tag-mendimi-kritik","tag-prishtina"],"authors":[{"term_id":378,"user_id":384,"is_guest":0,"slug":"agron-demi","display_name":"Agron Demi","avatar_url":{"url":"https:\/\/sbunker.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/1665768189196.jpg","url2x":"https:\/\/sbunker.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/1665768189196.jpg"},"user_url":"","last_name":"Demi","first_name":"Agron","description":"Agron Demi \u00ebsht\u00eb hulumtues i politikave publike, drejtor ekzekutiv i Institutit GAP dhe nj\u00ebri nd\u00ebr analist\u00ebt politik m\u00eb t\u00eb shquar n\u00eb vend. M\u00eb par\u00eb ka punuar me NDI, n\u00eb projekte ndihm\u00ebse p\u00ebr komisionet parlamentare t\u00eb Kuvendit t\u00eb Kosov\u00ebs. Agroni ka mbaruar studimet p\u00ebr Administrat\u00eb Publike dhe p\u00ebr Pun\u00eb Sociale n\u00eb Universitetin e Prishtin\u00ebs. Ka qen\u00eb kolumnist i rregullt n\u00eb disa gazeta vendore. Si aktivist i shoq\u00ebris\u00eb civile, ai \u00ebsht\u00eb an\u00ebtar bordi i organizat\u00ebs jo-qeveritare Sbunker."}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sbunker.org\/sr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sbunker.org\/sr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sbunker.org\/sr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sbunker.org\/sr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/384"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sbunker.org\/sr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14697"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/sbunker.org\/sr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14697\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14718,"href":"https:\/\/sbunker.org\/sr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14697\/revisions\/14718"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sbunker.org\/sr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sbunker.org\/sr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sbunker.org\/sr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sbunker.org\/sr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14697"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sbunker.org\/sr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=14697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}