Home as a Choice, Not a Birthright
There is a strange certainty people carry about belonging, as if it were something fixed, inherited, sealed into the passport we receive at birth. But belonging is not a birthright; it is a sensation, a settling, the quiet way a life begins to fit around us. I grew up in Serbia, yet it is Austria that became my home — not by coincidence, but by alignment. Serbia remains a place I love, but it is no longer the place where I belong.
This has nothing to do with ranking countries or weighing their worth. I don’t believe in that kind of hierarchy. Austria gives me financial stability, and I cherish its media landscape because it still reflects the fact that I live in a functioning democracy. Serbia, on the other hand, offers something I value just as deeply: people whose hearts open quickly, whose instinct is to welcome rather than to assess. It is a place where strangers become familiar with astonishing speed, a place untouched by the poison of anti‑migration narratives. Both countries give me something real. Both matter. But only one of them feels like home — simply because my family, the family I chose and built, lives in Austria. That is where my life has taken root.
And here is the paradox I keep circling as both a student and a person: I know, intellectually, that nations are “imagined communities” — constructs held together by stories, symbols, and shared fictions. I can trace the genealogy of nationalism, cite the literature, explain how identities are produced and reproduced through institutions, rituals, and narratives. I can dismantle the idea of the nation with academic precision. And yet, even with all that knowledge, I cannot pretend that nations do not matter. They do. They shape the conditions of our lives, the possibilities available to us, the emotional landscapes we inhabit. They are imagined, yes — but imagined with consequences.
It is easy, in theory, to say that we could organize the world differently. That borders are arbitrary, that citizenship is exclusionary, that the nation‑state is an imperfect container for human belonging. All of that is true. But I have no better proposal for how to structure the world at this moment. None of us do, not really. We critique the system while living inside it, aware of its constructedness yet unable to step outside its gravitational pull. We can pretend we are rational about all of this — that our scholarly distance protects us from sentiment — but how rational are we, truly? Even the most rigorous academic is not immune to the quiet tug of place, memory, safety, and attachment. Even scholars carry a pulse beneath their theories.
It is a peculiar kind of patriotism, this affection for a country I wasn’t raised in — a loyalty that grew quietly, almost shyly, over time. I arrived in Austria at eighteen, at the fragile beginning of adulthood, when everything in me was still unformed and searching for a place to land. And Austria became that place through the slow accumulation of safety, structure, and possibility. It is the country where I learned how to be an adult, how to build a life, how to trust institutions, how to imagine a future without bracing for impact.
My attachment to Austria is not nostalgic; nostalgia belongs to Serbia. It is not inherited; my roots are elsewhere. It is something more deliberate: a loyalty shaped by the life I built here, by the people who became my family, by the stability that allowed me to grow into myself. It is a patriotism born not from childhood memories, but from the quiet recognition of where I feel safe and seen.
I did not inherit this home. I grew into it. And in that growth — slow, deliberate, and deeply human — I found a kind of patriotism that has nothing to do with flags or anthems. It is the patriotism of gratitude, of choosing a place because it chose me back, of recognizing the soil in which my life finally learned how to bloom.
It is the contradiction I have learned to live with: Even as I understand nations as imagined communities, I still feel the gravitational pull of the one that formed me, just as I do for the one that allowed me to become myself. I can question the rationality of national attachment, dissect its constructedness, and trace its genealogy with scholarly detachment, yet I continue to inhabit its emotional architecture. The mind may know that nations are inventions while it also remembers where protection was felt, as if safety itself were a form of unconscious citizenship that no critique can dissolve.
As a scholar in becoming, I am not exempt from the very forces I analyze; perhaps none of us are. Perhaps the task is not to transcend these contradictions, but to acknowledge them — to accept that imagined things can still be real, and that countries and nations matter, no matter how critically we think about them.
