Go. Be Changed. Return.

On Montenegro, and some advice for the young folk.

If you had asked me a few years ago how much faith I had in Montenegro as a place in which I could satisfy my ambitions, I would have given you an answer I had partly reached myself and partly digested from everyone around me: never going to happen.

I deeply believed that this was a country in which I could never realize my dreams—a country too small for the extent of my imagination, ambition and goals; a country where wanting too much could feel almost embarrassing, as if ambition itself were a youthful misunderstanding that life would eventually correct.

I was not entirely wrong. In many ways, I am still right.

The constraint

Montenegro has only 623,633 residents, fewer people than many ordinary European cities. Tourism, directly and indirectly, contributes around a quarter of its economy. Beyond tourism, hospitality, construction, real estate and the state, there are not many industries deep enough to absorb thousands of highly ambitious, technically capable people.

Smallness is not a sin. It can even be turned into an operational advantage. But first it is a constraint. There are fewer serious organizations, fewer exceptional teams, fewer laboratories, fewer investors and fewer places where a young person can observe genuinely excellent people at work forming hypotheses, testing ideas, making difficult decisions and discovering how things can be done better in the real world.

The same institutions, families, political networks and employers appear again and again. If you are interested in something that does not already exist here, you are often expected either to abandon the interest and adapt, or to build the entire surrounding ecosystem yourself. The latter is possible, but it is extraordinarily difficult. It requires persistence, financial security and a level of support that many people simply do not have.

There are also cultural problems that we should be honest about. Too many coffees are mistaken for work. Too many conversations produce nothing. There is too much purposeless drifting, too much just getting by and waiting for someone else—usually the government—to repair one's life. There are too many environments in which speed is suspicious, excellence is socially uncomfortable and initiative earns a person more resistance than support.

“You are too young.”

“That is not how things are done here.”

“You do not have the right connections.”

These statements describe a society in which human agency is too often treated as an exception. To act despite that resistance can require an almost superhuman persistence, but persistence itself is not equally available to everyone. In poverty, perseverance is expensive, and so are dreams.

When legitimate routes to achievement, status and independence appear closed, illegitimate ones can begin to look strangely legible. Corruption, exploitation and criminal power do not become acceptable, but they can become socially comprehensible in a country where too few honest paths to consequence are visible. This does not excuse immoral behavior. It should make us ask what kind of society allows criminal agency to appear more credible than constructive agency.

For a person with deep intellectual desires, someone who wants demanding work, a worthy mission, capable colleagues and a good life, intellectually, financially and socially, the thought of remaining here should still cause concern. Montenegro cannot presently offer every young person the full extent of the future they can imagine, nor always the substantive experience needed to pursue it.

Too often, young people are offered, and learn to accept, positions that exist mainly on paper: titles without authority, projects without consequences, responsibilities that are performed ceremonially rather than carried through the difficult motions of examining a problem, asking many whys and many hows, testing an answer and bringing something real into existence. The country becomes skilled at awarding the appearance of responsibility before giving young people the chance to experience its weight.

Staying is not patriotism

None of this means that remaining in Montenegro is an act of cowardice or a failure of ambition. Many exceptional people stay, build and sacrifice here, often accomplishing more under difficult conditions than they might have achieved in a mature system. Staying can be a clear and courageous choice. But staying should not automatically be presented as patriotism, just as leaving should not automatically be presented as betrayal.

Patriotism becomes dangerous when it is used to make young people smaller so that they can fit inside the opportunities already available. Governments, parties, NGOs and institutions often praise the young for staying without asking whether they are learning, creating or being trusted with anything real. Geography is then mistaken for contribution. A person can remain in Montenegro for an entire life without giving much to it, while someone thousands of kilometers away may transform what is possible here.

The honest question is not whether you stayed. It is whether you grew, and what your growth made possible for others.

One person cannot carry an institution

A few years ago, I believed that the departure of Montenegro's most capable people was simply a national tragedy. In the immediate sense, it is. Look at almost any institution in the country and you can imagine Montenegrins abroad who could contribute to it: doctors trained in great hospitals, engineers from global companies, professors from leading universities, civil servants who have seen functional administrations and entrepreneurs who understand what competitive markets demand. We have no shortage of capable individuals.

But bringing back one brilliant person does not transform a system.

Place that person at the head of a ministry, faculty, hospital or company and they will improve some things. Soon, however, they will collide with the executional capacity of the organization around them. The leader may understand urgency, ownership and standards, but the institution is made of hundreds of daily decisions by everyone else.

Institutions are not only laws, buildings and organizational charts. They are collective habits:

• whether a meeting begins on time
• whether an employee tells the truth about a delay
• whether someone notices a problem and takes responsibility without being chased
• whether criticism is understood as an attack or as useful information
• whether a manager hires someone better than themselves
• whether a junior employee is trusted with consequential work
• whether evidence can defeat hierarchy
• whether an organization rewards competence or loyalty
• whether a promise actually means that something will happen
• whether failure produces learning or merely a search for someone to blame

One person cannot carry all of that.

This is why I have begun to think that Montenegro does not need fewer people to go abroad. It may, in fact, need more.

Brain circulation

This does not mean that we should celebrate permanent emigration or pretend that brain drain is harmless. Across the Western Balkans, roughly one-fifth of the population already lives abroad. The region loses doctors, engineers, nurses, researchers and young families. Labor shortages deepen and public institutions weaken. Remittances, already close to 10 percent of Montenegro's GDP, help families consume and survive, but money sent home is not the same thing as new institutional capacity.

The mistake is to treat departure as the final event. The meaningful unit is not emigration but the entire circuit: departure, education, work, accumulation, continued connection, collaboration, investment, partial return and, sometimes, permanent return.

The objective should be brain circulation.

People who spend serious time abroad do not bring back only degrees and money. They bring tacit knowledge: an understanding of how good organizations behave when nobody is performing for an audience. They learn how quickly things can move, how clearly people can communicate, how seriously a deadline can be taken and how much responsibility a young person can actually carry. They acquire professional confidence, relationships, capital, technical ability and a more accurate sense of what is possible.

Migration scholars call some of this “social remittances”: the norms, practices, expectations and forms of social capital that travel with people. Research on Polish migration, for example, has found that migrants transmitted not only financial resources but also different workplace habits, values and ways of organizing life. Other research finds that return migration can support entrepreneurship, while skilled diaspora networks can increase investment and knowledge transfer even when people do not permanently return.

These things are learned through exposure.

A person must experience an organization in which a deadline is real before fully understanding how costly our casual relationship with time can be. They must work somewhere where a twenty-three-year-old is trusted with something consequential before realizing how much talent our hierarchies suppress. They must see a manager admit a mistake, a company dismiss a dishonest high performer, or a public official treat citizens as people to be served before understanding that our dysfunctions are not laws of nature.

What Poland, Croatia, and Serbia teach us

This is one reason Poland matters, although its story should not be romanticized.

After joining the European Union in 2004, Poland experienced enormous outward migration. Millions of Poles worked in Britain, Germany, Ireland and elsewhere. Many eventually returned; many did not; others returned and then emigrated again. The country's transformation was not caused by return migration alone. It was driven by European market access, foreign investment, infrastructure, institutional reform, domestic entrepreneurship and large cohesion transfers. Across the countries that entered the EU in 2004, average GDP per person rose from approximately 60 percent of the EU average at accession to around 80 percent two decades later.

But mobility was part of that transformation. Poles left, saw different systems, developed networks and returned to a country that was gradually becoming capable of using what they had learned. Poland did not become successful because its people abandoned it. Nor did they return simply because the government asked nicely. They returned when the combination of opportunity, wages, infrastructure, family and quality of life made return a reasonable personal decision.

Croatia offers an even more relevant warning. Its entry into the EU in 2013 initially accelerated emigration rather than reversing it. The opening of borders made it easier for young Croatians to leave for Germany, Austria and Ireland. The country lost hundreds of thousands of people during the following decade.

Only more recently has the direction begun to shift. Immigration has exceeded emigration since 2022, and in 2024 Croatia recorded 70,391 arrivals, including 13,290 returning Croatian citizens. Most arrivals were still foreign workers rather than returning Croats, so Croatia cannot yet be presented as a completed return-migration miracle. Its experience makes the harder point: opening the doors does not automatically bring people home. At first, it may empty the country faster. Return follows only when life at home becomes competitive enough to make use of the freedom those open doors provide.

Serbia is at an earlier stage. It is not experiencing a clean mass reversal of emigration. It is, however, beginning to build the infrastructure of circulation through organizations such as Returning Point, which connects the Serbian diaspora with opportunities, institutions and people at home. The concept is more intelligent than the old demand that everyone “come back.” It recognizes that someone can contribute through a company, investment, mentorship, research project or international network without immediately relocating their entire life.

The limits are instructive too. One study of Serbian returnees found that highly educated participants were often less satisfied with the conditions they encountered. Return without reintegration can simply produce a second departure.

Montenegro now stands near its own version of this transition we must be prepared to face.

Montenegro as a base

As of July 2026, Montenegro has opened all 33 negotiating chapters and provisionally closed 18, making it the clear frontrunner in the EU accession process. Membership is not guaranteed; it remains conditional on work that the country itself must complete. But if we do complete it, Montenegro's psychological and economic geography will change.

Our formal home market will no longer end at the borders of a country of 623,000 people. Montenegrin companies will operate inside a European market of roughly 450 million consumers. People, services, capital and ideas will move more easily. A company may be headquartered in Podgorica, employ people in Nikšić, sell to customers in Berlin and Paris, raise capital from Amsterdam and collaborate with researchers in Milan.

EU membership will not make us economically equal overnight. It will not eliminate language barriers, weak management, corruption or the advantages enjoyed by companies from richer states. Croatia's experience shows that it may initially make leaving even easier. But it will enlarge the set of things that are possible.

Montenegro does not have to be the market. It can be the base.

This is particularly important now that more intellectual work can be performed across borders. Software, artificial intelligence, design, finance, consulting, media, research and many forms of professional service do not require a domestic customer base large enough to sustain them. A person can live near their family, sea, mountains, language and culture while working for organizations and problems far beyond the country.

That combination is more powerful than we appreciate. People do not return only because salaries converge. They return because a sufficiently good professional life can finally coexist with the personal life they value.

Why we leave, why we stay connected

I have met people who have lived in the United States and Western Europe for decades and still say that their deepest friendships are Balkan, ex-Yugoslav, Montenegrin, Serbian, Croatian or Bosnian. This is experiential, not statistical, but something in the humor, intensity, hospitality and emotional directness of this region remains irreplaceable for many of us. We leave, yet remain tied to our people.

We leave because we need air. We want education, consequence, growth and the feeling that becoming unusually capable is not a social offense. But many of us do not leave because we have stopped loving home. We leave because, at that moment, loving it and becoming who we want to become seem incompatible.

The opportunity of the next decade is to make them compatible.

The objective should not be to drag everyone home. Return is a personal calculation involving partners, children, careers, money and identity. Many people will never return permanently, and the country should not resent them for it. A Montenegrin professor abroad can supervise students here. An engineer can establish a development team. A doctor can train a local department for several weeks each year. An investor can finance a company. A business leader can find customers for Montenegrin products. A student can create an internship for the next student.

Return can be physical, economic, intellectual or institutional.

Ten thousand

This is why I keep returning to the number 10,000.

One excellent person will improve their immediate environment but remain constrained by it. One thousand will create visible islands of excellence. Ten thousand people, however, would represent around 1.6 percent of Montenegro's entire population. If each meaningfully influenced only ten or twenty colleagues, students, employees or collaborators, the effects would reach a substantial part of the country.

This is not an econometric model. It is an intuition about scale.

Montenegro does not need every person to change. It needs a sufficiently dense network of people who have experienced a different standard and refuse to pretend that dysfunction is inevitable: people distributed across companies, schools, hospitals, municipalities, media, universities and government. Not a new elite that lectures everyone else, but working examples of another way.

Returnees can also fail. Some come home condescending, believing that a foreign diploma makes them inherently wiser than the people who stayed. Some import methods without understanding the local context. Some expect gratitude merely for appearing. This is not what the country needs.

The value of going abroad is not that it makes someone superior. It is that it exposes them to different equilibria, to societies and organizations where behaviors that seem unrealistic here are simply normal. The task upon return is to translate those lessons, not worship the countries from which they came.

Go to be changed

So my advice to young Montenegrins is simple: go.

Go to the most demanding university that will accept you. Work in an organization whose standards frighten you. Find people more capable than you and learn how they think. Experience a place where excuses do not carry much weight. Become financially independent. Learn a skill that the world values. Build friendships and professional relationships far beyond our region.

Do not go merely to collect a diploma or photograph yourself beside a famous institution. Go to be changed.

At the same time, do not allow departure to become contempt. Stay connected to people at home. Help someone after you. Share information. Create an internship. Make an introduction. Spend part of a summer building something here. Find projects through which your knowledge can travel before you do.

Return when return gives you enough leverage to create, rather than merely enough guilt to sacrifice yourself.

Montenegro does not need martyrs who surrender their potential to prove that they love it. It needs capable people who could live elsewhere but find a way to build through it. Sometimes that will mean permanent relocation. Sometimes it will mean several months each year. Sometimes it will mean running an international company from Montenegro. Sometimes it will mean remaining abroad while directing capital, knowledge and opportunities home.

What must change

The government's role is not to advertise patriotism. It is to reduce the cost of circulation.

That means financing serious study and work abroad while maintaining relationships with those who leave. It means knowing who our diaspora are, what they can do and which problems at home need them. It means transparent hiring, procurement and research funding so that returnees do not discover that competence is less useful than a party connection. It means making it easy to open companies, recognize qualifications, invest money, teach temporarily, work remotely and collaborate with public institutions. It means treating a visiting engineer, doctor or professor as part of the country's capacity, not as a guest performing a symbolic act.

Above all, it means building institutions worthy of return.

But this cannot remain only a recommendation to government. It must become a commitment by all of us.

To the young person in Montenegro

Within the next year, apply to one university, fellowship, company or program that feels beyond your reach. Put yourself in an environment that will demand more of you than home presently can. Do not wait for permission to discover how far you can go.

To the Montenegrin abroad

Choose one concrete channel through which what you have learned can travel home. Mentor one student. Hire one person. Finance one idea. Teach one course. Open one door. Make one serious introduction. Help create the opportunity you once had to leave in order to find.

To our institutions

Stop treating the diaspora as an audience for speeches and ceremonial conferences. Build real projects with clear responsibilities into which people can enter. Find our ten thousand. Connect them by knowledge, industry and ambition. Give them credible ways to contribute, and make it possible for their contribution to survive contact with the system.

The better question

The question Montenegro should ask is not: how do we stop our best people from leaving? That question comes from fear and leads to barriers, guilt and slogans. The better question is: how do we ensure that leaving enlarges Montenegro rather than empties it?

Montenegro may never be large enough to contain every dream its people have. It does not need to be. It can become a place from which those dreams are launched, connected and eventually brought home in some form.

I do not have faith because I believe Montenegro has already changed. It has not changed enough. I have faith because I recognize the beginnings of a pattern seen elsewhere, and because I have begun to understand how countries like this can change: not through one savior, one government or one miraculous investment, but through the gradual accumulation of people who have seen another standard, internalized it and chosen to pass it on.

Go. Learn. Earn. Become difficult to impress. Discover that even the great systems abroad are only systems built by people. Keep your connection to home without allowing it to trap you. Then return, physically or otherwise, and bring something more useful than nostalgia.

Bring standards. Bring knowledge. Bring relationships. Bring capital. Bring ambition.

One person will be resisted. A thousand will be noticed.

Ten thousand will be impossible to ignore.