By focussing on the power of narratives and the narrative aspect of identity and nation, the author provides a new way of writing ethnography, based on the stories of young urban intellectuals and sociopolitical activists in Novi Sad, Serbia. While they continuously find themselves kept on Europe's threshold of in and out, in the northern Serbian autonomous province of Vojvodina a cultural and political war is taking place, dominated by discussions concerning nation, multiculturality and Europeanness, but also sovereignty, Balkanism and Orientalism.