In “Fear and Freedom (original language: Strah i Sloboda)”, the lawyer, civic activist, producer and columnist Vlatko Sekulović describes the dialectic between the ancestral sentiment of fear and its uses and misuses in society and politics.
In this original text, Vlatko Sekulović offers to the readers of Serbian Monitor an overview of his book.
Writing a book about fear and freedom means, at least in my understanding, writing about the most elementary contradiction of human existence, but also about one of the most concrete political questions of our time. Namely, a human being is not only a rational subject who calculates interests, votes according to material benefit and acts in accordance with clearly perceived goals. Such a picture of man, although useful in certain theoretical models, is insufficient for understanding politics, society and history. Man is also a being who fears: he fears death, humiliation, disorder, the loss of meaning, the disappearance of the community to which he belongs, the uncertainty of tomorrow, and often, perhaps most dangerously, the other human being.
It is from this premise that my book Strah i sloboda (Fear and Freedom) starts. Its basic intention is not to add one more description of Serbian, Montenegrin or post-Yugoslav reality, nor to repeat already known political diagnoses. The ambition is different: to examine the deeper psychological, cultural and political mechanisms through which fear becomes a social force, and to explain why freedom cannot be reduced only to constitutional rights, elections, procedures or formal guarantees. Freedom is not complete if people live in permanent fear. In that sense, freedom from fear is not a poetic expression, but a fundamental political and security category.
At first sight, this may seem like psychologising politics, and perhaps even an unnecessary detour from the usual language of political science, law or history. However, it would be equally wrong to underestimate the importance of constant psychological tendencies at the collective level, as Gaetano Mosca teaches. Societies, like individuals, create systems of meaning in order to manage fear. They create myths, institutions, ideologies, rituals, memories and identities. They organise time, territory and belonging. They define what is sacred, what is dangerous, who is “ours” and who is “theirs”. Consequently, political communities do not live only from constitutions and laws, but also from narratives through which their members understand themselves and their place in the world.
The central idea of the book is that fear is not an exception in political life, but one of its permanent foundations. The question, therefore, is not whether fear exists, because it always exists, but what a society does with it. Does it transform fear into solidarity, responsibility and institutions capable of protecting the dignity of the human being, or does it convert fear into hatred, nationalism, authoritarianism and aggression? Does fear lead to a stronger demand for freedom, or to the voluntary surrender of freedom in exchange for the illusion of protection? This is, in my opinion, one of the key questions for Serbia and the entire region.
In the book I deal with fear from several angles. First, as an existential phenomenon. Human beings know that they are mortal. This knowledge produces fear, but also the need for meaning. Culture is, among other things, the attempt to make life meaningful despite the inevitability of death. Ideologies, whether political or religious, often function as what Otto Rank called ideologies of immortality. They promise that the individual, although mortal, may participate in something greater and more durable than himself: the nation, the church, the revolution, the state, history, and to transcend death. Such constructions are not necessarily destructive. They may give meaning, dignity and orientation. But they become dangerous when they demand the sacrifice of the individual, or when they define other communities as existential threats.
This is why nationalism occupies an important place in Fear and Freedom. I do not approach nationalism merely as a doctrine, nor only as a set of political demands related to sovereignty, territory or language. I analyse it also as a mechanism for managing fear. Nationalism is powerful because it offers the frightened individual an alleged symbolic shelter. It tells him that he is not alone, that he belongs to an ancient and meaningful collective body, that his personal fragility is overcome by the eternity of the nation, a promise of an afterlife. But here it is important to be precise: by nation I do not mean a neutral sociological category, nor a community defined only by language, history or culture. I mean the sacralised nation, that is, the specific meaning and value attributed to the term “nation” by the nationalist. In this interpretation, the nation becomes more than a community of people; it becomes a superior moral entity, almost a sacred object, endowed with a value greater than the individual and placed above ordinary political disagreement.
This process of sacralisation inevitably suppresses the individual. More precisely, it suppresses the multichromatic and multilayered nature of human identity. A person is never only one thing. He is, at the same time, a parent or a child, a friend, a professional, a citizen, a believer or a non-believer, a reader, a worker, a neighbour, a person with memories, fears, desires, loyalties and contradictions. Nationalism reduces this complexity to one dominant identity: the person is primarily and ultimately a Serb, a Croat, an American, a Russian, a Palestinian, a Jew, or any other national designation. Without that national identity he is presented as almost nothing; through it, however, he becomes everything. As a member of the sacralised nation, he is no longer merely an individual among individuals, but part of a chosen collective body.
A monument to those who fell for the liberation of the city during the Second World War, the Eternal Flame of Sarajevo became a symbol of the unity of the different peoples of Yugoslavia.
The danger lies precisely in this transformation of belonging into chosenness. To be ethnically or nationally “chosen” does not mean only to feel special, protected by history, sacrifice or destiny. In the logic of nationalism, to be chosen easily becomes to be above others. The sacralised nation does not merely ask for recognition; it demands hierarchy. It does not only seek dignity; it tends to deny equal dignity to others. Once this happens, violence can be morally justified as defence, domination can be called security, and the suffering of others can be made invisible or deserved. We can see, in different historical and political contexts — from Gaza, to Ukraine, to Yugoslavia in the 1990s — how tragic and dangerous this logic becomes when collective identities are sacralised, when the other is transformed into an existential threat, and when the individual disappears behind the abstract body of the nation. That is the source of its magnetic power.
In other words, nationalism transforms personal insecurity into a delusion of collective certainty. Precisely because it promises comfort, protection and symbolic immortality, it can also transform nations into conflictual groups and become a permanent source of violence. Once the sacralised nation is understood as the highest, almost transcendental value, then everything that appears to endanger it can be presented as an existential danger. Political opponents become traitors. Minorities become suspicious. Neighbouring nations become historical enemies. Criticism becomes betrayal. The future becomes colonised by the past. In such circumstances, politics no longer functions as a space of disagreement among citizens, but as a permanent mobilisation against alleged enemies. Fear ceases to be a human emotion and becomes a political technology.
This is particularly visible in the post-Yugoslav space. Yugoslavia was not merely a state structure, nor only a constitutional arrangement. For millions of people it was an ontological framework of external reality, a system within which identity, security, memory and the idea of the future were organised in order also to manage the historical cultural, ethnic and religious diversity. Its violent disintegration therefore produced not only new states and new borders, but also deep traumas. These traumas did not disappear with the end of the wars. They continued to live in political language, in school narratives, in media representations, in family memories, in mistrust toward neighbours, and in the constant temptation to interpret every crisis through the categories of national survival.
One of the main purposes of the book is to show that the region of Western Balkans cannot be understood if we look only at institutions, parties and elections. Of course, they matter. But beneath them there are fears: fear of disappearance, fear of humiliation, fear of being dominated by others, fear of renewed violence, fear that one’s own suffering will be forgotten, fear that the future will only repeat the past. Political actors know this very well. That is why fear is so often produced, intensified and directed. A frightened society is easier to govern. A frightened citizen seeks protection more than accountability. A frightened public accepts exceptional measures more easily than it defends normal democratic life.
A general view of an opposition protest rally against election fraud outside the Yugoslav parliament building in Belgrade centre October 5, 2000. The protests were an example of a population able to overcome the fear of physical violence and the nationalist propaganda.
This also explains why freedom from fear must become a central democratic objective. It is not enough to say that citizens have the right to vote if they live in a society „under siege“ in which public disagreement produces threats, in which institutions do not generate trust, in which the future is constantly presented as catastrophe, and in which the individual is valued only as a member of a collective. The human being must be restored as the reference object of security. Security cannot belong only to the state, to the territory, to the nation or to the abstract “national interest”. If the individual lives without dignity, without trust, without predictability and without protection from violence and humiliation, then the security of the state is a very poor substitute for freedom.
The book therefore argues for a broader understanding of security, one that includes human security and the freedom from fear. This is not a naïve or sentimental position. On the contrary, it is a realistic one. A society in which people do not trust institutions, in which they fear each other, in which young people do not see a future, and in which public life is permanently poisoned by narratives of threat, cannot be stable in the deeper sense of the word. It may appear stable because the state is strong, because power is centralised, or because conflict is temporarily suppressed. But such stability is fragile. It rests on pressure, not on trust.
For this reason migration is also treated in the book as more than an economic phenomenon. People do not leave their country only because salaries are higher elsewhere, although that is obviously important. They also leave in search of safety, predictability and meaning. They leave when they conclude that the society in which they live cannot offer them a credible future. In that sense, migration is a form of judgement. It is a silent but powerful statement about the quality of freedom in a society. If people, especially young people, feel that their life can be more normal, less burdened by fear and more dignified elsewhere, then the problem is not only demographic or economic, but political and existential.
This is one of the reasons why I believe the book should be read. Not because it offers simple answers, but because it proposes a framework for understanding phenomena that we too often observe separately: nationalism, authoritarianism, distrust, emigration, collective trauma, the abuse of history, the weakness of institutions, and the inability of societies to imagine a future outside permanent crisis. These are not isolated problems. They are connected by fear, by the ways in which fear is interpreted, politically used and culturally reproduced.
Another reason to read the book is that it tries to move beyond the sterile opposition between patriotism and anti-patriotism, identity and cosmopolitanism, nation and individual. The point is not to deny the importance of identity. No human being lives outside identity. Cultural communities matter because people give them meaning and significance. The problem begins when one identity absorbs all others, when belonging becomes a prison, and when the dignity of the human being becomes subordinate to the imagined eternity of the collective, in the specific case of the nation. A free society is not a society without identities, but a society in which identities remain plural, open and compatible with the rights and dignity of others.
In that sense, Fear and Freedom is also a book about responsibility. If fear is part of the human condition, then the decisive question is who manages it and for what purpose. Democratic politics should reduce destructive fear. It should create trust, protect pluralism, prevent violence, and make the future imaginable. Nationalist and authoritarian politics do the opposite: they need fear, they produce it and then offer themselves as its solution. This is the oldest and most efficient mechanism of domination. First society is convinced that it is in danger; then it is asked to give up freedom in the name of protection.
The book was written from the perspective of our region, but its relevance is not only regional. Europe and the world are again living in an age in which fear has become one of the strongest political currencies. War, migration, economic insecurity, technological change, climate anxiety and the crisis of liberal democracy all contribute to a general feeling of instability. In such a context, the temptation to retreat into closed identities and aggressive politics is growing. Serbia and the post-Yugoslav societies are not an exception to this process; they are only one of its particularly instructive examples.
If I had to summarise the main message of Fear and Freedom, I would say the following: we cannot build a democratic, decent and stable society if we do not understand fear, and we cannot be truly free if fear is permanently used as the basic instrument of politics. Freedom from fear does not mean the absence of all danger, nor a utopian world without conflict. It means a society in which fear is not constantly produced from above, in which citizens are not mobilised through hatred, in which institutions create trust, and in which the individual does not have to disappear into the nation in order to feel protected.
This is why the book should be read not only by those interested in political theory, security studies or nationalism, but also by anyone trying to understand why our societies so often return to the same patterns: fear, mobilisation, enemy, crisis, leader, obedience. To understand that pattern is already to weaken it. To name and to attribute relevance to fear is not to surrender to it. On the contrary, it is a step toward freedom.
Vlatko Sekulović was born in Belgrade on 4 August 1969. He is an attorney at law, civic activist, producer and columnist. He holds a PhD in Political Science and a Master’s degree in Law.
He is a researcher at the University of Donja Gorica in Podgorica. His academic and public work focuses on political theory, nationalism, fear and freedom, human security, identity, migration, and the political and social transformations of the post-Yugoslav space.
Sekulović served as a Member of the National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia in two parliamentary terms, in 1993 and 2001. In 2004, he was State Secretary at the Ministry for International Economic Relations.
He was one of the organisers of the 1992 Student Protest in Serbia and one of the founders of both the Student Union of the Faculty of Law in Belgrade and the Student Union of Serbia.
In addition to his legal and political engagement, he is active as an author, columnist and public commentator. His work combines legal analysis, political thought and civic engagement, with particular attention to the relationship between individual freedom, collective identities and the political use of fear.
He is the recipient of the title Commendatore of the Italian Republic.
The book “Strah i Sloboda” (Fear and Freedom) is published by Akademska Knjiga.
