A volunteer centre in Slovenia collects donations for victims of the 2014 floods in the Balkans. Demotix/Rok Rakun. All rights reserved.In May last year, devastating floods swept through parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia, killing scores of people and displacing many thousands. What followed was a wave of solidarity that was blind to the very ethno-national identities that are supposed to determine and divide the Balkans.
From individual acts of kindness to collective mobilisations of assistance, the acts of solidarity were many and varied. As floods of migrants now traverse the Balkans in search of sanctuary within the EU, so new waves of solidarity have emerged. Contained within these outpourings of solidarity are new seeds of political participation and new structures for civic activism, focusing not on the suffering of events, but on the suffering of the everyday.
The wars of the nineties sowed seeds of division that rendered trans-Balkan solidarity a distant prospect; one that only Yugo-nostalgics would cling to. A failure to deal with the nationalism and crimes of the past fuelled scepticism about reconciliation and the idea of a shared future. Only the umbrella of EU membership provided shelter from the rains of further fragmentation.
