Absent Europe: Civic Protest and the Erosion of EU Symbolism in Serbia

Abstract This article analyses the strategic management of European Union (EU) references in Serbia's 2024–2025 student mobilisation. Drawing on original fieldwork and 18 semi‐structured interviews, the article integrates framing theory with the Discourse‐Historical Approach to reconstruct how EU‐related meanings were produced and operationalised. The analysis shows that EU symbolism was strategically withheld in domestic protest spaces as boundary work: avoiding overt EU cues reduced exposure to accusations of foreign orchestration and helped maintain participation across an ideologically heterogeneous coalition. At the same time, Europe remained available as a moral register and a language of standards, whilst the EU, as an institutional actor, was evaluated sceptically through frames of hypocrisy, unequal recognition and instrumentalisation and treated as a politically costly reference point. By treating EU‐related symbols and references as objects of strategic regulation, the article contributes a ‘from below’ account of how EU legitimacy is interpreted in Serbia's contested authority landscape.