No, Let’s Not Build a Dubai on the AdriaticOn Europe’s Balkan periphery, there is constant dispute over what space this region truly belongs to. It’s neither quite the West nor truly the East — let alone part of the Global South. In times of war, economic recession, and globalization, the Balkans are rarely mentioned: a “desert of post-socialism” left off the map. A steady flow of neocolonial projects continues in the Balkans, often cast as an “unfinished capitalist transition.” The most recent example: an agreement signed between Montenegro and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This deal grants extraordinary privileges to the investor, including the ability to bypass national legislations and to basically pick a piece of land they can privatize. The tragicomedy of parliamentary democracy reached new heights when Montenegro’s government approved the act via legislators’ WhatsApp group. The message was sent by Prime Minister Milojko Spajić, a crypto evangelist and ex–Goldman Sachs analyst. After that, Spajić triggered the urgent procedure in the Assembly to ratify the two agreements with the UAE: one on economic cooperation and the other on cooperation in tourism and real estate development. The Assembly passed them, after a debate that ended after 1 a.m. Following a public outcry due to blatant corruption, the appropriation of land, and the potential devastating environmental impact, President Jakov Milatović returned the controversial agreement to the Assembly unsigned, meaning a second vote is imminent. The Agreement on Cooperation in Tourism and Real Estate Development is seen as especially problematic. It states that any contracts and further agreements with UAE investors are exempted from both countries’ legislation on public procurement and tendering. To put it simply: a UAE investor can choose any mountain, beach, or the land near any river or lake, and together with the Montenegrin government do whatever they want with it — even if that means expropriation, devastation, or the creation of a fancy apartheid-style resort for the oligarchy.
https://jacobin.com/2025/05/montenegro-uae-privatization-long-beachBritain: “Back on the world stage” or walking the tightrope?In the past month, diplomatic history has been made – in case you didn’t notice – with Britain securing ‘landmark’ trade deals with India and the USA, and carrying out a ‘UK-EU reset’, supposedly heralding a new era for Britain’s relations with Europe.
“Britain is back on the world stage,” declared Sir Keir Starmer in a series of flashy social media videos. These deals will mean “jobs saved, jobs created, more growth” and “more money in the pockets of working people”. The liberal press was no less effusive. “Starmer managed to have his cake and eat it,” gushed The Independent, referring to the European Union deal. The Prime Minister has defied all the odds to “break the Brexit conundrum”, they proclaimed. And so, at long last, Britain is saved! The Brexiteers’ dream of a buccaneering ‘Global Britain’, championing free trade across the Seven Seas, has been realised! All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds! Rule Britannia – and so on, and so forth… Not quite.
https://communist.red/britain-back-on-the-world-stage-or-walking-the-tightrope/Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth Chapter 3: The Pitfalls of National ConsciousnessHISTORY teaches us clearly that the battle against colonialism does not run straight away along the lines of nationalism. For a very long time the native devotes his energies to ending certain definite abuses: forced labour, corporal punishment, inequality of salaries, limitation of political rights, etc. This fight for democracy against the oppression of mankind will slowly leave the confusion of neo-liberal universalism to emerge, sometimes laboriously, as a claim to nationhood. It so happens that the unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps. National consciousness, instead of being the all-embracing crystallization of the innermost hopes of the whole people, instead of being the immediate and most obvious result of the mobilization of the people, will be in any case only an empty shell, a crude and fragile travesty of what it might have been. The faults that we find in it are quite sufficient explanation of the facility with which, when dealing with young and independent nations, the nation is passed over for the race, and the tribe is preferred to the state. These are the cracks in the edifice which show the process of retrogression that is so harmful and prejudicial to national effort and national unity. We shall see that such retrograde steps with all the weaknesses and serious dangers that they entail are the historical result of the incapacity of the national middle class to rationalize popular action, that is to say their incapacity to see into the reasons for that action. This traditional weakness, which is almost congenital to the national consciousness of under-developed countries, is not solely the result of the mutilation of the colonized people by the colonial regime. It is also the result of the intellectual laziness of the national middle class, of its spiritual penury, and of the profoundly cosmopolitan mould that its mind is set in.
https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/fanon/pitfalls-national.htm