MM Srdjan, you have been involved in many projects that are based on the notion of participatory structures becoming a generative tool of spatial practice. Although most of your work is concentrating on the territory of the Western Balkans, it resists being localizable partly because your theoretical backbone engenders a universality of approach as to the way in which the positive aspects of your findings can be applied to other areas and practices. Can you please introduce your main thesis?

SW I am very much interested in the positive aspects of Balkanization as a source of spatial practices to come. Balkanization can be explained by the self-propelled desire for distinction within a densely networked neighbourhood, to be distinct from the others nearby, and to find ways and means of achieving this goal, sometimes by any means necessary. I think that this desire has a profound impact on the layers of physical and virtual interventions above a territory as such and as the one that belongs to many. Today when everyone feels overwhelmed by the fallout idea of designing difference through appearance, like branding does, the Western Balkans do their own thing to distinct themselves among many in a sort of sincere, if not basic way. In my opinion, the emerging Western Balkan capitals, all attempting to be distinct, can serve as good models for the future of Europe to come, which they are part of. At the same time, as a historian Giancarlo Marainello pointed out, Europe always reformulates itself as a consequence of itself having always been fractured. Europe is allegedly based on being divided before being united and its history and reality is the one of managed separations. Sometimes the separations were managed badly, which resulted in great losses, so to focus of how to manage rather than what to manage has come into play many times. The Western Balkans, today dispersed may be analogous to some prototypical state of Europe that makes itself visible as an oddball to the unification trends in the EU. In fact the Western Balkans may just be too close to an analogy of warring states which Europe really wants to leave behind. There, where the theory of European territory, and legality, stops, we have spatial practices and networks across the ethnic nation states in the Western Balkans which hold true against the divisions. These practices often have cross-national connections as one their primary mission statements. They are basically practices that are locked in a locality, but that always need to be present somewhere else as well, as a reproduction of the locality. I think that Balkanization complex of knowledge is the right source pool to investigate the future of locality with Europe.

MM Could you please elaborate on the framework of the recent EU political invention of the Western Balkans?

SW Western Balkans can not be explained by a regular EU terminology simply because this territory would quickly be labelled illegal by EU standards. These standards refer to the EU’s own measure of land and sovereignty. However, the EU’s insistence on the Western Balkan term somehow works half way and it is an almost alright thing to call the thing. The Balkan in the Western Balkan amalgamation is the remnance of the Turkish presence in one of its pasts. The Western in it is the signifier for the ongoing Balkan’s Westernization. This means the legal territorial separation of the land from its geographical constraints; from the geographical Balkans, the Greek Peninsula and ethimological Balkans, and from the epominous mountain ridge departing from Bulgaria. When the geographical and ethimological are taken away then there is only Western that remains to be deployed as strategy to situate this piece of Europe within the European Union. On the other hand, there is no agency today other than the International Crimes Tribunal in The Hague that will define how far the Westernization shall go. Thus Western Balkans are always on the verge of being seen as becoming a wild territory within a legal framework, as in the analogy to the Wild West in the American West. The Western Balkan term works best to describe a sort of purgatory to the European Union as still a right-wing Christian hold-on. At the same time, I recently heard conservative, but at the same time utopian speculation that the EU does not really need the Western Balkans within its own system just because there are more opportunities further in the Middle East to ponder. In my opinion to omit Western Balkans in the process of North-Atlantic integration is naïve.

MM In regard to the notion of Balkanization, how can Europe further explore the role of architecture vis-à-vis democratic processes?

SW Some proposals by Dutch venture firms like OMA and MVRDV have already used Balkanization as a vehicle to visualize and entail democratic territorial management, rather than to enforce it with an overall plan. My firm NAO is trying to use this energy to preserve one of the rare recreational spaces in Novi Sad and turn it into a locally managed entity. The use of the term was interesting, but still falling short of aims to disperse the European territorial wealth beyond its internal limits. Spatial practitioners need to be part of power structures in order to be evasive as to what exceptions territory can or shall make. At the moment, the Western Balkans may be just too much of an fresh information to the EU so they would want to phase it and make it appear best if the Western Balkans would just cool down. So at the moment, Europe may be able to use the knowledge of Balkanization to cool its own inner upheavals and further absolve the desire for national distinction. Often, this would take presence by local iconic architecture becoming local for the good instead of the bad reasons.

MM Could Balkanization become a model for universal cultural operating?

SW It would be interesting to witness virtually what this would effectively entail. The usual powers of replicating universal cultural operating are still centralized within either empires of global capital. Who is the Western Balkans to be trusted even a bit to project a particular model of the part to the whole? The World would have to bend to whatever Balkanized unit, territorial or political, would see fit locally, or even economically. Another difficulty with this question is that, today, Balkanization may be closer to defining its potential than even the meaning of what universal may mean not have an understandable not apprehendable potentiality at all.

MM Europe Lost and Found (Lost Highway Expedition), a recent project by the School of Missing Studies in the Western Balkans, and Evasions of Power, a book based on contemporary spatial practices producing work and theory in architecture, art and literature at the tangent of the current geo-political turmoil, both attempt to produce a lexicon of terms and definitions imagining the Western Balkans as a vital and important source. If one was imagining Europe purely as a space, what are the relationships between politics, identity, and spatial production?

SW Let’s not be fools and forget that Europe is a far more complex spatial organization than the Western Balkans, far more complex, because at the most part, EU space is directed towards a functioning nexus of connections and restrictions. The Western Balkan model is still complicated, but a much smaller knot of spatial relationships than the EU. This knowledge is in fact hiding in the learning of the potentials of its inner complexity, and learning to become complex. The source of knowledge that we are talking about in Europe Lost and Found can be of large interest to the EU for a number of reasons: it is compact, it is time-based, and it offers networks of external spatial relationships to Europe, which are neither neo-colonial nor purely exotic. Each country today in the Western Balkans is fashioning itself distinct from all the others. Maybe this is a framework for identity that took Western Europe several decades, but it may take Western Balkans only a single decade. Why not seeing European values into the speed of their own rise?

MM What can Western Europe learn from the Balkans?

SW It can learn far beyond than just being its other self.

MM You have argued Milošević as Architect. Why?

SW I used George Konrad’s, Hungarian novelist and essayist, strategy to reveal hidden desires in dictators that could do much more in fact than they did. Konrad wrote a book referring to Marx’ Kapital viewing it as a fiction, and neither reality nor treatise, where he said that Stalin was a very bad writer, worse than Lenin, who actualy was worse than Marx, still as a writer. Similarly, I felt I could get deeper into the psychological profile of Milošević by shifting the focus of his actual profession. In Leibnitz terms every “god on earth” is both a self-proclaimed lawyer and an architect, the law and design go hand in hand. I discovered that Milosevic was a lousy architect, but in fact as lousy as he was a lawyer, which still left him to be considered a leader. Thus, I thought that looking at this man as an architect will bypass many obstacles to his or to the collective political responsibility in Serbia during the ‘90s and reveal pure desires, like those of Stalin or Hitler. In Milošević’s case, he failed as an architect – and he destined to be one – thus he failed his destiny to build cities.

MM How can one produce cross-national knowledge in regard to economic, political, and cultural geographies vis-à-vis the construct that we call Europe? How can one address future spatial decision-making in regards to the city and countryside?

SW There is so much going on in the countryside alone that the cities cannot follow. Cities will probably have to adapt and if they do not, they will be forced to adapt.

MM Self-organisation inhabits an inherently opportunistic core. One could argue that the most fruitful means of participation is that of the uninvited outsider, one that doesn’t follow the protocols of politically correct integration and processes of democratic inclusion, but strategic exclusion in order to generate new knowledge. Has neo-liberalism finally invaded the core of participatory practices?

SW Neo-liberalism is at the mouth of all our critics so it is difficult to say that we are dealing with the same portion of knowledge that the critics have. The problem is that the term neo-liberal is like air. We cannot take a clear stand on it other than to try to breath. The danger for any spatial practice is to loose sense of the speed of change, and that often one cannot be against and without neo-liberalism at the same time. The opportunities rising through self-organization may perch through the barrier.

MM From your point of view, how will Europe develop over the next two decades?

SW Whenever Western Balkan politicians do not know how to respond to delivering failures in the North Atlantic integrations, one can read in the media that Serbia will join EU in 2027, Macedonia in 2037 etc., which is exactly two decades from now. These two decades will be understood as a living-with-a-process, but also as a living-with-an-obstacle and I think that this phenomenon will be mutual to Europe proper and Europe ascending. I think that promise of Europe will decrease even more in the near future. Europe still does not deploy the full cultural potential of Eastern Europe, which suffers from being next to Western Europe, and to be too close to it. I wish that Eastern Europe takes the next decade or two to square with the West, square it equal, and then, and only then, can the Western Balkans contribute the quality shift to the European continent. One thing at the time.