Independence Before Identity—Montenegro at Twenty

Twenty years ago, on this day, May 21, 2006, a country restored itself to the map and immediately faced the question it had never fully answered: what exactly had come back? Half a percentage point secured Montenegro’s independence. The threshold was 55%. The result was 55.5. By only 0.5%, a state was born—but not a nation. 

A Montenegrin political philosopher provides the explanation of this situation. John Plamenatz (Jovan Plamenac), born in Montenegro and later a professor of political philosophy at Oxford, drew a fundamental distinction between two kinds of nationalism. Western nationalism belongs to peoples who already possessed a developed cultural identity, such as England or France, where the nation preceded the political movement. Eastern nationalism, as in Montenegro’s case, by contrast, belongs to peoples whose cultural identity and state must be built simultaneously; they must construct the very characteristics of nationhood—standardised language, national literature, historical narrative—while building political institutions at the same time, often imitating Western forms while resisting Western dominance. Two decades after independence, Montenegro’s census data makes the application plain. It is still building what Western nations had before their nationalism began.

The data is consistent and worrying. Between 2011 and 2023, the proportion identifying ethnically as Montenegrin dropped from 45% to 41%, while those identifying as Serbian grew from 28% to nearly 33%. Language follows the same pattern: those identifying Serbian as their mother tongue grew from 43% to 45%, while those claiming Montenegrin as their mother tongue fell from 37% to 34%. Twenty years after independence, Montenegro is not becoming more Montenegrin; it is becoming less.

This is not surprising to anyone who knows the history. The identity-based rivalry that defines contemporary Montenegro was never resolved; it was only periodically suppressed. By 1878, the Congress of Berlin recognised what the Montenegrin people had long asserted: that they were a sovereign nation. That recognition lasted forty years. In 1918, without a referendum, Montenegro was absorbed into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. This absorption didn’t just end the country’s sovereignty, but it opened a wound that has never fully healed. This is evident in the identity-based rivalry of the period, between those who saw Montenegro as a distinct nation and those who saw it as inseparable from Serbia. The independence seekers, the Greens (zelenaši), were defeated by the unionists, the Whites (bjelaši); however, the question they were fighting over was never settled. That rivalry had not disappeared, and it still hasn’t. The 2006 referendum simply forced it to a vote.

What Montenegro does possess, and what the census data cannot capture, is a civilisational inheritance that long predates these modern disputes. While there is no agreed exact date on where Montenegrin history begins, its identity starts with its name, Crna Gora, the Black Mountain. Montenegrins are a people whose identity has been shaped by its highlands, specifically the dark limestone highlands of the Dinaric Alps, above all Mount Lovćen. It is because of these highlands that the Ottoman Empire could not subdue them, where a distinct culture survived, where the highland warrior tradition was forged. It is precisely on Lovćen that Montenegro buried its greatest thinker, Petar II Petrović-Njegoš, the Prince-Bishop of Montenegro, who gave the warrior tradition its philosophical voice. In 1846 he wrote Gorski vijenac (The Mountain Wreath), a text that remains the closest thing Montenegro has to a national philosophy. Some of its greatest themes are national struggle, liberation from Ottoman rule and preservation of identity, as well as heroism and sacrifice, portraying the virtue of courage and willingness to die for honour, faith, and nation. At its core, Gorski vijenac defines Montenegrin identity not by ethnicity but by resistance. The core philosophical understanding lies deeper than resisting the Ottomans; it is about what a people must be willing to sacrifice to remain itself. 

The dynasty that gave Montenegro its greatest thinker, the Petrović-Njegoš dynasty, ruled Montenegro for over two centuries, from 1696 to 1918. Under Danilo I, Montenegro adopted its first constitution in 1855, legally establishing it as a secular principality with its own legal framework. Under Nikola I, Montenegro became a kingdom; that same dynasty commissioned the codification of Montenegro’s customary tribal law into a written legal code. Compiled by the jurist Valtazar Bogišić, the Opšti Imovinski Zakonik took centuries of unwritten tradition and gave it a long-lasting legal form. While many European countries inherited Roman law or incorporated Napoleonic codes, Montenegro developed its legal code rooted in its own social customs and traditions. Montenegro, in other words, had a soul, and it had shaped it long before anyone came to question it as a nation.

The nation that defined itself through resistance has, since independence, been seeking admission. Since 2006, Montenegro has greatly been oriented toward the West. It joined NATO in 2017. It became a candidate country to the EU in 2010, and it is aiming to be the twenty-eighth member by 2028. This integration is arriving, as the census data shows, before Montenegro has properly defined itself as a nation.

Plamenatz, drawing on Mazzini, argued that a person cannot become genuinely European without first being fully themselves as a people. Someone who feels inadequate or inferior in their national identity is unlikely to become as good a European as they might otherwise be. Applied to Montenegro, if Brussels resolves the identity question before Montenegro does, it may produce not better Europeans but worse ones, Montenegrins who are neither settled in who they are nor genuinely European, belonging fully to neither. A Montenegrin who is uncertain whether Montenegrin is even a real language, who is unsure whether the nation he belongs to is meaningfully distinct, will approach EU membership not as an equal partner bringing a particular civilisational heritage to a common project but as a supplicant grateful to be absorbed. The EU’s institutional architecture encourages exactly this dynamic, that is, linguistic harmonisation, standardised regulatory frameworks, and the gradual erosion of cultural particularity as a precondition of belonging. Most EU member states could absorb this pressure because they entered the project with consolidated national identities. Montenegro would be entering it while the consolidation is still unfinished and with the identity question still actively contested.

These disputes over identity, language, and history carry a meaning far greater than they appear. To insist on the Montenegrin language, the Montenegrin nation, is not a matter of mere semantics. Words carry meaning; they shape how a people understands itself. To deny a language, a culture, a history, a nation, is to deny its sovereignty. A state without a nation is like a body without a soul; it is a corpse. Twenty years after independence, with EU integration accelerating, the recognition of Montenegrin identity is a political necessity. A state that cannot answer the question of who its people are cannot represent them, and a people who cannot answer that question for themselves will find it answered for them, on someone else’s terms.

Gorski vijenac already gave Montenegro its answer. The recognition of the Montenegrin nation is crucial for contemporary Montenegrin politics; it is a matter of survival. There is no neutral framework. Every political order embodies a concrete orthodoxy, and the EU’s post-national framework is no exception; it treats cultural particularity as an obstacle rather than a foundation. Why wouldn’t it? Most of its members emerged from Western nationalism. But those same principles, implemented in Montenegro, will dissolve an identity that’s been left in a soulless limbo state of existence. Montenegro, with its culture and traditions, outlasted the Ottoman Empire’s centuries of pressure, the forcible erasure of its statehood in 1918, and decades of communist Yugoslavia, but will it be able to outlast the European Union? Whether it can depends on whether Montenegro is willing to do what Njegoš demanded long before the EU existed, that is, to know what it is and to refuse to let anyone else impose that. Genuine sovereignty requires more than a flag and a seat at the UN. It requires a strong settled sense of what that people is that the state is representing.