# Author’s note

Tomislav Tomašević and the Institute for Political Ecology (IPE) of Zagreb undertook the first inventory of Commons initiatives on the territory of the former Yugoslavia, coupled with the formulation of a narrative arising from these different experiences. This work was published in 2018 as a book entitled *Commons in South East Europe* (SEE).

The strengths of the book are to be found in the resolutely critical approach to the “classical” definitions of the commons inherited from, among others, Elinor Ostrom, and in the historical perspective providing valuable knowledge about the experiments of “social property” and other practices of the commons in socialist Yugoslavia. Tomislav Tomašević, representative of the municipalist citizen movement named “Zagreb is Ours !”, mobilizes the narrative produced by his research as a tool to legitimate the political struggle led by citizens in favor of the commons, ecological conservation and economic democracy.

In this interview, Tomašević explains the dynamics between the “formulation” of the commons experiences in the region and the revival of political struggles supporting the re-appropriation of spaces, services and public policies.

I met Tomislav Tomašević in Zagreb, in the context of organizing the Green Academy, a summer school bringing together movements from the green left in the Balkans. I found it important to share with the francophone public these words and this singular experiment of the commons experienced in the former Yugoslavia.

Collective and social property of public spaces and industrial and natural production was legal and widespread in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, governed by Josip Broz Tito from 1945 to 1981 and dismantled during the dramatic civil wars in the 1990s. Intimately linked to this political past, the commons in South East Europe remain today a symbol of a distinctive ideological identity, deeply anchored in emancipatory and anti-nationalist thought. This symbol became a political marker of the struggle for social, environmental and spatial justice against the irresistible forces of privatization and the austerity policies induced by the “transition towards liberalism”. Indeed, precarious living conditions generate political claims that are substantially out of step with the existing institutions, which foreclose public decisions and refuse changes induced by social groups.
# Cultural dominations and solidarity in the Commons

Whoever visits the European semi-periphery knows the debate about the legitimacy of knowledge and about the recognition of the region’s history. Commons fall within a latent, historical tension present among the European leftist parties, which consists of the application of Western vocabulary on practices experienced for a very long time in Europe and especially in the Eastern part of the continent. While this article does not aim to claim the origin of an emancipatory policy, it seems nevertheless relevant to re-embed some parts of the social history of the Commons in collective knowledge. This approach can help identify the recent experiences and the large-scale legal and territorial experimentations carried out in cultural spaces generally experiencing little impregnation of the “at all cost” liberalism from the Anglo-Saxon world.

Indeed, it is politically rich and necessary to take into account a plurality of experiences and discourses in order to assert the legitimacy of the Commons paradigm.

Municipalist experiences in Serbia and Croatia suffer from low international exposure, even though they have been destabilizing the political landscapes in the capitals Belgrade and Zagreb. This weakens the political struggles and makes the risks faced by the leaders of these mobilizations invisible. It thus seems essential to link the different commons initiatives and projects in favor of municipalism in Europe and in the world as a means of asserting international solidarity and strategically strengthening mobilization capacities, media exposure and political analyses of concrete experiences.