People think it's an insult. However, it was once part of the learned discourse, it was once studied. And if you look, I think we need to rethink historical colonies a little. They were not, so to speak, feudal countries that colonized them, they were modern economies. You have the development of the automotive sector in Belgium, for example, where King Leopold suddenly, after the Berlin Conference, gets about a million square kilometers in Congo. He gives something called concessions to factories like Abira, or investors like Abira and Belgian mining companies, who then, in response to the demand for rubber in Europe, start investing in those countries.

So what happens? You actually have countries controlling the economies of other countries. When I talk about colonialism, I’m talking about economic colonialism, and the fact is that this type of colonialism historically continued even after the colonies gained independence. So, even after Congo became an independent state, you had, for example, Union Minière, a company mining uranium in the Katanga region of Congo. People may know Patrice Lumumba, who was arrested and died in connection with that. He was actually killed by the Belgian police that were still there. The same police, Force Publique, came there in 1885. So, Belgian police and military were still there even after independence, and the company was still there, and the same economic processes continued both before and after. Whether you call yourself a colony or not is not the point. The point is what is happening. And what was happening is that you have the automotive sector in European companies, which absolutely needed rubber at that time. There was an increasing demand for rubber, and that’s why you had to somehow force those people to dig for rubber. And that unfortunately played out in such a way that corporations had their private armies, I mean, people had their hands cut off for low productivity.

But you know what the problem is here? If you look, these are data that are not known in Serbia. There was a book called "Women Speak" about textile workers in Serbia, where it turned out that due to low productivity, women in the textile sector were given a red band around their wrist when they got their period, because that was when productivity was low, and they were reassigned to other sectors. And if they didn’t wear the band for three months, they were fired on the assumption that they were pregnant. This is happening in Serbia today. Then you have workers wearing diapers, and you have our workers being threatened if they protest. For example, in Fiat, workers had to give up the right to strike. My point is, how do we increase productivity? Are we increasing it in the same way that historical colonies did?

This isn’t a black-and-white situation. You have nuances of forced labor. I, for example, studied the history of forced labor at Humboldt, because my topic was the political economy of Nazism. And you absolutely have researchers who define this in different ways, whether the worker can say they have a problem, whether they have freedom of movement, and so on. And if we look at some of these criteria, we can say that the type of forced labor, in one way or another, is on the rise in Serbia, including forced labor under the threat of voting for SNS. And if we want to see how that fits in, it fits into the theories of colonialism. Absolutely. We have the wrong image of historical colonies. These weren’t systems that belonged to the past. It’s not even 100 years since those colonies gained independence. And absolutely, you have econometric studies that prove that in countries like Congo, in those areas where mining took place, the population’s education level is lower because everyone worked in the mines, why would they need education, health is worse because they have inherited diseases, and the area is polluted. You have greater wealth inequality because mining magnates got rich while the general population stagnated. You have very poor regions because if you don’t work for the mine, you’re nothing. Like in Bor — if you work for the mine, everything’s fine, if you don’t work for the mine, nothing.

These are all economic processes that absolutely have their continuity. And I’m afraid that — if we look at these big corporations that today are getting more and more money from the European Union, from the European Commission, from subsidies from countries like Serbia — we are actually giving them power, and they are then having an increasing influence on our economies. They can, for example, as Rio Tinto did in Spain at the beginning of the 20th century, become so strong in Spain that they could dictate wages to people. If Rio Tinto lowers wages for miners, then other corporations will do the same. And I think we are very lightly and perhaps even carelessly accepting and approaching the topic of colonialism. As if it’s just an insult. Sorry, but colonialism historically developed in capitalism, in modern market economies. And you even have — in Britain, there was this imperialist party, there were studies on imperialism. John Hobson was one of the first to go to Congo, went to Africa, and reported on it. I mean, you have Henryk Grossman and Lenin even wrote about it, even our people in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and I want to mention that at the end. French authorities were in charge of the Bor mines, and they were in the same cartel with Rio Tinto. And the point is, we had, for example, Sergije Dimitrijević, and some other Serbian authors who studied the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which wasn’t formally a colony, but they studied it as a colony due to economic processes. If they did that back then, what’s stopping us from being serious and looking at the social aspects of these investments? Foreign investment isn’t just when someone gives you money, and you say, “I’m super rich,” no. You’re giving a company power over land, over the state, over a nation, and that company will do something. What will it do? You need to study that.

Well, of course, sodium-ion batteries and hydrogen-powered engines are being researched, for example, BMW is investing in that, as I mentioned earlier. But what perhaps isn’t discussed here, though it's being debated a bit in the European Commission and touches on the issue of colonialism, is that projections indicate that European companies themselves will need lithium to a certain point, after which they will supposedly start recycling it. They are already calculating that, if lithium is recycled, it will remain in the core countries, while we will just continue mining it.

Is that sustainable? Absolutely not. Mining is not sustainable in itself. It's an industry where accidents happen and problems arise, and you must manage that. Lithium itself isn’t something I would call sustainable. Why? Because the market is changing so rapidly, and extracting it requires new mines, that the expansion of mining, in and of itself, will cause more harm than good. Here’s what I mean: When calculations were made for how much lithium we need, when I spoke with some people, some even against it, they said they had never considered whether a European citizen really needs five mobile phones in the next two or three years, whether someone wealthy can have ten electric cars. They didn’t consider that.

So, what’s the point? If you want to calculate how much lithium we need for sustainable development, without addressing these questions, you are simply serving the expansion—economic expansion, material expansion—everything that the green transition is supposed to be against, which then ignores the issues it was supposed to resolve. The green transition benefits the current European economies by giving them more material, whereas the point is to reduce it. If we want to reduce it, we must recalculate based on what we truly need as human beings—what our needs are, whether consumerism is okay—we must solve that, it's a social issue.

If you really want to pursue a full green transition, you must reduce consumerism in core countries, in the EU. Without that, this story doesn’t even begin. If you don’t do it, you will simply continue to serve mining corporations and auto corporations, whose goal is to sell more vehicles, more lithium batteries, and make profits. If that’s the goal, we’re doing nothing but consuming more materials, and whether that will benefit anyone—probably not. For me, the solution to the green transition is investment in the public sector, investment in public transport. Germany has a railway transport collapse, France too; these need to be solved if they want to go into the green transition and invest in it. It's much less lithium for their public buses, for example, which service many more citizens. The benefit is greater. If you want to solve it, you don’t need new mines—you can solve it with existing resources and lithium reserves. But the point of that story is—mining companies and auto companies don’t profit from that, private sector does not profit. So, to me, the solution is the public sector and what is, for us, a taboo topic—economic planning. That requires planning, I apologize, some may be allergic to it, but the green transition itself is planned—either it's planned for companies or for citizens. If it's not planned for citizens, then it’s planned for companies. Without addressing that, we will again become those mining colonies that will serve others' profit needs.

Well, first of all, about 70 experts were present—lithium, energy, green transition, mining experts from various sectors, from civil society to engineers. As far as I saw, the director of European Affairs from Rio Tinto was there addressing us, but he didn’t present any counter-arguments. That’s it. He just told me that he had a different view of the economy, but what that means—I mean, my colleague and I don’t share the same view on the economy either. He didn’t provide any scientific counter-arguments. Likewise, Sara Matthews from the European Greens, who chaired the meeting, literally agreed at the end that this is neocolonialism and said that the European Parliament is under corporate pressure from Rio Tinto. She clearly thought that there were some pressures we probably don’t know about being exerted on the European Parliament. I would certainly ask her about that, but the point is, there are voices in the European Parliament against this. After that, several series of research were initiated regarding the economic effects of Rio Tinto. I participated in one. It's a document that will be sent to the European Commission for consideration when it decides whether to grant additional funds to Rio Tinto. I think if that happens, there will be chaos here, but if it doesn’t, it will somehow give us a boost.

In any case, the situation is polarizing, and this was one of the events that further polarized the situation and broke that silence that existed in the European Parliament before. This will give them, let’s say, additional arguments and ammunition when someone asks if you’re against this just because some Serbs are protesting, or is there another reason? Now they can say—first, this will harm the domestic economy, it will pull us into a politically sensitive project, now linked to violence, death threats, arrests, imprisoning people, activists having their homes raided. When European politicians are asked, why did you support this project in Serbia, what will they say? I didn’t know they were arresting people. Why are we voting for you, and why are we giving our European taxpayers’ money to a corporation that is destroying Serbia? That will then reflect poorly on those European politicians, and that's the card we’re playing because this is increasingly becoming an international issue—it’s no longer just a Serbian problem, but an international one—how Serbia will react to Rio Tinto, how Rio Tinto will react to Serbia, because if problems arise, there will be chaos here, in the European Parliament, and in the European Commission, because now we’re tied in a way we didn’t want to be. I believe that if this project happens, it could even threaten the green transition because it will expose all the authoritarian layers that support it, and that’s the specificity of Rio Tinto and the Jadar project—because in a strange way, it’s turned out to be some kind of lens or microscope, I don’t know how to say it, but it has shone a light on all those hidden processes that have historically supported the mining sectors in former colonies.

They don’t care about Congo, and Rwanda is far, maybe someone will read about it in the news. But if something happens in Serbia, in a European country, where people are suddenly arrested, pregnant women’s homes are raided, and citizens are being coerced into accepting a mine, that already looks bad in Germany, in German media, in the European Parliament—it raises many questions: will we treat every other EU member state this way?

Lastly, what’s interesting is that in the European Parliament, lectures on neocolonialism were held precisely because of this, where they themselves asked—wait, when it came to historical colonies, we acted like this and that, do we want to act like that now?