Study at UNIRSM from Serbia they rode bicycles to Brussels. To trivialize: not to Moscow, not to Washington, not to Beijing. In that choice of destination, there is a political fact much more important than numerous negotiation chapters, reform road maps or diplomatic formulations that have been determining the language for years. European integration.
However, this very fact seems not to have been fully recognized.
Maybe because we are all - European institutions and domestic political actors, each in their own way - too used to recognizing politics only when it comes in administratively orderly forms: through institutions, procedures, negotiations, declarations, elections, monitoring reports and technical criteria. And sometimes politics happens differently. Unexpected. Through the body, movement, duration and symbolic choice of destination.
Closeness without obligation
In modern language there is an expression statusship. It indicates a relationship that exists but refuses to be defined. Intimacy without obligation. Intimacy without clear recognition. Belonging without a mutually affirmed future. It is hard to resist the impression that the relationship of Serbia - and the wider Western Balkans - towards the European Union has been working exactly like this for a long time.
Close enough not to speak of the exterior. Far enough that one cannot speak of full affiliation.
There are negotiations, there are criteria, there are conditions, there is a common political vocabulary. But the final political form remains suspended. The future exists precisely because it is constantly slipping away.
The problem is not just the long wait. The problem is that procrastination becomes a political technology. Permanent candidacy ceases to be a passing phase and begins to function as a special regime of political time: open enough to maintain expectation, vague enough to avoid the commitment of a final decision.
For decades, the dominant question was: is Serbia ready for Europe?
Student cycling to Brussels, however, quietly but very precisely reverses that question.
Democratic subjectivity
Because what does it actually mean when young people from Serbia, in a moment of deep distrust towards institutions, political fatigue, economic uncertainties and geopolitical fragmentation, still direct their political imagination towards Europe? Not declaratively. Not through marketing slogans. Not through the bureaucratic language of harmonizing regulations. Already through the collective act of movement.
The fact that they drove to Brussels is not a geographical detail. It is a political statement. Perhaps even one of the strongest political statements in recent years.
Because in that choice of destination there is something that goes beyond the classic discourse of European integration. There is a claim of political affiliation. Or more precisely: an assertion about to whom one's own democratic demand is directed.
That is precisely why this gesture carries a political weight that far exceeds the administrative life of the negotiating chapters. It is much easier to open or close a certain chapter than to produce democratic subjectivity.
And perhaps democracy today does not primarily suffer from a lack of institutions, but from a lack of democratic subjects. From the lack of people who understand themselves as political actors of the common world.
In this sense, the students did not just demonstrate a pro-European orientation — which is already a banal enough interpretation of the event. They did something much more interesting: they contributed to the European political imaginary.
That's an important distinction.
A return to bureaucratic patterns
Because in the dominant language of European integration, the Western Balkans almost always appears as an area of deficiency. Not reformed enough. Not stable enough. Insufficiently democratically consolidated. A space that must catch up, prove, adapt, wait for evaluation.
But political subjectivation rarely arises through mere evaluation. It arises when individuals and collectives begin to see themselves as participants in a common political world - even when formal recognition is not yet fully secured.
This is exactly where student cycling becomes politically significant. Not because it solves the membership issue. But because it raises the issue of democracy. Because maybe the question is no longer just whether Serbia is ready for Europe.
Perhaps the question is whether modern Europe still knows how to produce democratic subjects. Does it still possess a political imagination capable of recognizing collective action that does not come from institutionally comfortable centers of power. Does he still know that democracy is not only governance, but also the ability to appear together in the public space, to act without guarantees, to take political risks.
The paradox, however, is that neither side seems to have fully recognized what actually happened.
European institutions quickly returned to their familiar register: wording of support, procedural languages, institutional manners. Domestic political actors did something very similar, each from their ideological trench position.
It is as if the event had to be translated as soon as possible back into already known political patterns in order to neutralize its potential unpredictability.
Europe as a political horizon
And maybe it was in that brief moment that politics in the truest sense of the word happened.
Not politics as administration. Not politics as a diplomatic routine. Not politics as the endless management of expectations. Rather, politics as the emergence of a collective subject that does not just seek a place within the existing European order, but actively participates in shaping what Europe can mean today.
This does not mean to romanticize the student protests. Nor to claim that political gestures can replace institutions. Democracy needs institutions. But institutions alone are not enough.
It is possible to have procedures without political imagination. It is possible to have legal frameworks without democratic energy. It is possible to have integration processes that last for decades, while it becomes increasingly unclear what is actually being integrated — states, markets, regulations or political entities.
This is perhaps the basic irony of this moment.
While European integration has been functioning as a kind of political for a long time statusship - closeness without full commitment, rapprochement without a final decision - the students did something almost old-fashioned: they articulated Europe as a political horizon. And that is precisely why their gesture deserves a more serious reading than it has received.
Because maybe the students riding their bikes to Europe aren't just trying to get to Brussels. Perhaps along the way they demonstrate something that has become much rarer and much more politically valuable today: the ability not to wait for democracy as a ready-made institutional form, but to produce it through joint action, duration, risk and collective movement.
Perhaps the question is no longer whether Serbia is ready for Europe. Perhaps the question is whether Europe still knows how to recognize its own democratic subjects when they come to it - on bicycles.
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