During the first day of protests in Sarajevo, one young man, among 50 others, had been pushed into the river by the police. A few days later, I watched as he appeared with a broken leg in front of the plenum. “I am a Catholic, I am a Jew, I am a Muslim, I am all the citizens of this country,” he said.

Another man added: “If I am a Muslim, and he is a Serb or a Croat, if we are hungry, aren’t we brothers? We are at least brothers-in-stomach.” Then he muttered, “I am not smart, but I just wanted to say this.” From the other corner of the fully packed hall, someone replied: “If you’re here, you’re smart!”

As Andrej Nikolaidis, a Sarajevo-born writer who escaped the city while it was under siege by Serbian forces in the early 1990s, said, “The citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina are these days greater Europeans than the Europeans themselves, they are now the ones who are serious about European ideals, while the E.U. created a museum of abandoned ideals.”

These plenums are attracting ever more people and are now part of the daily routine. During the day people protest in the streets, and afterward they gather in the assemblies. Instead of waiting for Godot — for Ms. Sontag, it was the “international community” that was supposed to stop the war; today it is the European Union, which is supposed to bring an end to economic despair — they have taken the future into their own hands.

But unlike the 1990s, when international action was the only solution, today the people are uninterested in European Union intervention. When Valentin Inzko, the union’s high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, said the unrest might require international troops to quell it, protesters lashed out at him, too.

Of course, the cynics among us could pose the legitimate question: What happened after the Arab Spring? What happened after Occupy Wall Street? And the answer might sound disappointing for anyone hoping to see something come of these new protests: In Egypt, we had first a stronger Muslim Brotherhood, and then military rule again; in the United States we find the same financial system again. So why would Bosnia and Herzegovina be different?

But this time, protesters are up against not a military dictatorship or a financial hegemon, but an ill-conceived, poorly run government that few people, in or out of it, believe in. And it would be wrong to say that the protesters are new to this game. The people of Bosnia and Herzegovina have been struggling, in one way or another, for decades to construct a better country for themselves. In that sense, the best answer we might give, for now, also comes from Samuel Beckett: Try again, fail again, fail better.