Walking through Banja Luka one evening just after nine, the icy Vrbas wind cutting through the empty streets, I heard Pink Floyd’s “High Hopes” drifting from a doorway near Trg Krajine:
“The grass was greener / The light was brighter / The taste was sweeter / The nights of wonder…”
A group of kids huddled nearby, warming themselves while streaming music from a phone.
The scene brought to mind an interview I’d read days earlier—a disheveled, award-winning director and activist for the “Serbian cause” praising Banja Luka’s mayor for transforming “a backwater into a city displaying all the symptoms of a European center.” I cynically wondered if any of these four kids had concrete plans to seek those “symptoms” in their undiluted form somewhere in Europe, as Bosnia’s grim statistics suggest, or if at least three had never traveled beyond their hometown.
I nearly crafted a sardonic social media post about it, but something stopped me: my mobile internet worked seamlessly. Without a second thought—just as I would in Belgrade—I’d opened Facebook. Banja Luka isn’t exactly abroad from a Serbian perspective, but not long ago, my phone bill would’ve screamed otherwise: 300 dinars for a short call, 3,000 for half an hour on YouTube. Yet here I was, months into using my Serbian mobile plan across Bosnia, Montenegro, and even Kosovo (a story in itself) without roaming charges, thanks to Telekom Srbija and its regional subsidiaries. For a fleeting moment, I glimpsed the mundane reality young Europeans take for granted: borderless connectivity, flights cheaper than three Big Mac meals, freedom built on “the familiar, just slightly different.”
For us, it’s harder.
The 450 km between Belgrade and Podgorica takes eight grueling hours by car, while flights to Tirana or Sarajevo cost a month’s minimum wage. Bosnia and Kosovo enforce Europe’s strictest visa regimes, and the main border crossing between Montenegro and Bosnia still lacks asphalt for kilometers. Despite being each other’s largest trade partners under CEFTA, regional mobility is paralyzed. Roaming fees remain exorbitant (despite short-lived abolition promises), and cross-border work permits are humiliatingly slow to obtain. No wonder 80% of Western Balkans residents reject the idea of living or working in neighboring economies, while over 60% haven’t traveled regionally in the past year.
Our combined GDP barely matches Slovakia’s—yet we have 12 million more people.
I’d never call any place a “backwater,” unlike that lauded director, but our infrastructure—both physical and mental—lags catastrophically. In this disconnected reality, where Europe’s three-decade-old integration remains a distant dream, regional companies are quietly bridging gaps faster than governments. Telekom Srbija’s seamless network, United Group’s “UniFi” Wi-Fi hotspots across the Balkans, or UniCredit’s fee-free ATM access for clients—these aren’t just business decisions. In our fractured context, they’re de facto corporate social responsibility, rewriting the rulebook on what connectivity means.
Back on Banja Luka’s main square, sipping tea in a dim café, I posted “High Hopes” instead of that scathing status. Those shivering kids reminded me: the grass is greener and the light is brighter—but only “when friends surrounded.” Only where borders are clear yet permeable, where people, services, and capital flow freely, can nostalgia for the past give way to nostalgia for the future.