On 25 October, Serbia’s student-led movement won a parliamentary majority, defeating an entrenched establishment after nearly two years of protests.
What began as outrage over a deadly railway station collapse in Novi Sad became a nationwide challenge to corruption and the exercise of power.
In Albania, the “Flamingo Protests” are challenging a luxury tourism project threatening protected wetlands.
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Women in Bosnia and Herzegovina who defended their river from hydropower development have taken their solidarity across the border to support Albanian communities fighting for theirs.
None of these countries are full European Union members. Brussels generally approaches them as recipients of European democratic standards, not as teachers.
But what if Europe’s democratic renewal comes not from its political centres, but from its edges?
Europe faces two connected democratic failures. The first is a failure to listen. The second is a failure of belonging. Looking to Europe’s edges could help address both.
The peripheries
First, Brussels has long treated the continent’s peripheries as resources to be used or problems to be managed. Ports move goods. Borderlands police migration. Coastal regions supply energy and tourism. Candidate countries receive instruction on democratic standards. Even when the centre consults local populations, it generally arrives with the questions already written and the solutions largely decided.
The political traffic generally runs in one direction: ideas flow outward from Brussels, while labour, energy and strategic assets flow inward. Rarely does Europe ask what its margins know that its centres do not.
Yet borderlands, divided cities, islands and ports confront Europe’s most pressing questions firsthand.
Who belongs? Who decides what development means? How do people share land, water or public space when their histories and loyalties collide? How does a community act together without agreeing on everything? These are not abstract policy puzzles. They are questions of daily life, answered through negotiation, cooperation, conflict and compromise.
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Serbia’s student movement challenged entrenched power through collective mobilisation. Albania’s protesters are asking who gets to decide whether a coastline is a public good or a private opportunity. And Bosnian river defenders have shown that political solidarity can cross a border rather than end at it.
None offers a blueprint for Europe. All offer practices worth learning from.
Europe’s second failure runs deeper. Liberal democracy rightly defends rights, constitutional safeguards and equal citizenship. But constitutional patriotism— the hope that shared loyalty to democratic rules can bind diverse societies— has too often proved too thin to satisfy people’s hunger for belonging.
Institutions can protect freedoms without giving citizens a sense of common purpose. A legal framework is essential. It is not, by itself, a political community.
Learning from the margins
Populists have seized this opening. Ethno-nationalist movements offer something that procedural liberalism often struggles to provide: attachment, solidarity, heritage and a story about who “we” are. But they build that belonging by excluding others. Their answer to a genuine democratic need is to make political community narrower and more fearful.
Europe cannot answer this threat simply by repeating its commitment to liberal norms. Nor should it concede the desire for rooted, meaningful belonging to those who would turn it into a weapon.
Here, too, the margins have something to teach. In places where neighbours inherit incompatible memories, where livelihoods depend on contested resources, and where borders cut through relationships, people sometimes build common purpose without first becoming alike. Shared work, obligations, arguments and care for a place can produce attachments stronger than abstract agreement and more generous than ethnic sameness.
We should not romanticise these practices of course.
Local solidarities can be exclusionary; informal compromises can entrench injustice. And winning an election is not the same as governing democratically. But refusing to idealise the edges is not a reason to ignore them. It is a reason to examine their political experiments with the seriousness routinely granted to ideas born in European capitals.
The two failures are connected. When Brussels sees the edges only as territories to administer, it overlooks the democratic practices through which people develop belonging. And when liberal politics neglects belonging, it leaves the field open to the far-right.
The answer is not another programme dispatched from the centre.
It is a reversal of the direction of learning. Let communities help define the questions before policy is written. Treat their experiments in shared life, public resources and contested heritage as sources of political insight, not colourful local anecdotes. Bring their ideas into Europe’s democratic debate.
Serbia’s victory does not prove that the margins have all the answers. It makes an uncomfortable possibility harder to dismiss: Europe may be searching for democratic renewal in the very places it has been taught to overlook.