Serbia's Choice

By Elizabeth Pond

Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 51, no. 2, April–May 2009, pp. 123–136

Suddenly, Serbia’s anti-Western exceptionalism has faded. After almost five years during which ultranationalists set the political agenda, pro-Europeans in Belgrade now hold power and accord top priority to joining the European Union. To this end the new Belgrade government is even tempering to a degree its questto restore the sovereignty over Kosovo that strongman Slobodan Milosevic forfeited a decade ago to NATO intervention and subsequent United Nations stewardship. The shift is incomplete and the way it is playing out is conferring some new legitimacy on the extreme Radical Party nationalists. Nonetheless, it is real enough to alter the dynamic of Serbia’s internal and external politics.

The turnaround is a tribute to the single most successful foreign policy of the European Union: the attraction of its soft power to make a growing arc of neighbours want the kind of democracy and market economy the EU wants, even if this requires painful reforms. It is a notable about-face for a nation whose leaders a short year ago threatened, if Kosovo declared independence, to turn its back on the EU, encourage next-door Republika Srpska to secede from Bosnia-Herzegovina, cut off Kosovo’s electricity supply, trigger a mass exodus of the roughly 120,000 remaining Serbs in Kosovo, or even send Serbian armed forces back into the province that NATO forced Belgrade to evacuate in 1999.

That was then, this is now. At last we are witnessing the birth of a ‘normal, boring, democratic’ Serbia, as Ivan Vejvoda, executive director of the Balkan Trust of the German Marshall Fund, put it as early as last May. The harbinger of transformation he perceived was a tiny shift in votes in yet another early election. The transformation was anything but predetermined. As neighbouring states rushed down the EU path, this land of 22 million in the heart of the Balkans held out the longest in refusing to become a ‘normal, boring’ state. It cherished its exceptional history as the heroic regional hegemon before and after its half-millennium of Ottoman subjugation from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century. It expected to lead again as Communist Yugoslavia disintegrated after the end of the Cold War; Milosevic successfully mobilised popular support for the use of force to carve a Greater Serbia out of Croatia and Bosnia in the early 1990s.

After Milosevic lost his last war, in Kosovo, and the democratic opposition unseated him by votes and street protests in 2000, reformist Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic and his Democratic Party (DS) did pursue a pro-European policy for two years and two months. But Djindjic was assassinated in 2003, and nationalist fundamentalists again set the tone. The Radicals, who coveted an even larger Greater Serbia than did Milosevic in the 1990s, won repeated pluralities in parliamentary and local elections and thrice came within a whisker of voting in their presidential candidate, Tomislav Nikolic.

Vitriolic campaign

The climax of Radical influence seemed to arrive in early 2008; the increasingly strident Vojislav Kostunica, prime minister and leader of the Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS...

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Elizabeth Pond, a Berlin-based journalist, is the author of Endgame in the Balkans (Brookings, 2006).

Muddling Through in Kosovo by Oisin Tansey and Dominic Zaum (February–March 2009)

The Making of Macedonia by Christopher Chivvis (April–May 2008)

Kosovo’s Moment, Serbia’s Chance by David Gowan (April–May 2008)

Yugoslavia After Milosevic by Jacques Rupnik (Summer 2001)