Forty years have passed since the SANU Memorandum - the 1986 document that unlocked the „previously controlled layers of the Yugoslav legacy" and set off a process whose consequences we are living today. From Milošević to Vučić, the model of power has stayed simple: a permanent coup.

The Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts published a Memorandum that academically formalised the ethnic resentments that, ten years later, would produce five wars in the Balkans. Milošević put it to use - through constitutional changes, economic manipulation, takeovers of the media. At the time it looked like „radical but contained" politics. Today we know it was the first model of what we now call the „institutional coup".

It's a style of rule in which the institutions formally exist - parliament, judiciary, media - but in practice are hollowed out. Parliament votes, but there is no debate. Courts hand down verdicts, but there is no independence. Media publish, but there is no information. On paper it all looks like a system. In reality it is a center where every string leads to a single cabinet.

Vučić refined the model. He turned the classic Milošević style into what commentators call „hooligan syndrome" - dialogue isn't negotiation but confrontation. With the opposition, with students, with the media, with the EU - the same tone with everyone. Never „let's discuss". Always „there is our line and your line, which is bigger".

The institutional devastation in Serbia has concrete markers. A captured state media. Parallel academic structures - the founding of a new state university that critics dubbed a „parallel universe", echoing the Albanian separatist tactics of the 1990s. The arrest of Belgrade's police chief, a former Vučić advisor on corruption, as a symbol of how anti-corruption institutions themselves function as part of the criminal networks.

For the Balkan reader, none of this is foreign. It's a story that repeats across the region with small variations. We've seen similar processes in Macedonia under Gruevski, in Montenegro under Đukanović in his last years. Orbán's Hungary is a European variation of the same pattern. The question still unresolved is whether these systems are sustainable, or just delayed catastrophe. The SANU Memorandum did one thing it wasn't designed for: it created a template. And the template is now being copied.