Ten years ago, at a briefing in the mission of the Russian Federation to the EU in Brussels, Ambassador Vladimir Čižov, in his recognizable style, a little joking and a little more serious, commented on the news about talks between high-ranking officials in Washington and key European capitals about Kosovo with the sentence: "For Kosovo, will be news when it is on the priority agenda of talks between Moscow and Washington".
I remembered Chizhov's remark while reading and listening to exalted or worried comments, depending on the environment from which they came, about the telephone conversation between the new US President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in which one of the topics of the conversation was the Western Balkans. In essence, the Russian ambassador's remark is still valid today: the news would be that Biden and Merkel did not talk about our region, and that Joe and the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, raved about the hilly Balkans.
For Pristina, and its Euro-Atlantic aspirations, it would have been much more important if Biden had dialed the phone number of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez than if he had chatted with the leaders of the EU and NATO members who recognized Kosovo. The leader of Spain's socialists is the only prime minister of European G20 members with whom Biden has not had a telephone conversation since winning the election to the White House in November.
Of course, Kosovo is not the reason for such treatment of Madrid in Washington. Biden is an old-fashioned democrat, and the Spanish government is too left-wing, not to say "communist", by the standards of the new administration. Because of this, Biden's national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, was tasked with officially contacting Monclaw, that is, his colleague in Sanchez's cabinet, Emma Aparisi. The two touched on a series of topics of mutual interest, from China to Latin America to the Sahel, as well as the fight against the covid-19 pandemic and climate change.
There is no mention of Kosovo despite the fact that Spain is the most important member of NATO and the EU that does not recognize the unilaterally declared independence of Pristina and that this is the biggest divergence between Washington and Madrid in international politics. Nor was it recorded that the representatives of the new American administration raised the issue of the former southern Serbian province in their contacts with colleagues from other NATO and EU member states, which do not recognize Kosovo.
Aleksandar Vučić is not the first Serbian leader who, at the expense of Kosovo, builds his political ego and spreads the belief about his importance and influence. Serbia is not an obstacle for Kosovo on its way to the EU, nor to membership in the United Nations. Moreover, unlike Serbia, which has a problem with what is written in the Constitution and the real situation on the ground, Kosovo knows exactly where its borders are. Paradoxically, in theory, Kosovo could enter the EU even without the so-called of a comprehensive agreement or some other solution with Serbia, when all EU members would recognize it, while Serbia will not be able to become a member of the EU until it resolves its relations with Kosovo.
Neither the previous nor the current government in Belgrade was wise and clever enough to understand a simple fact: Serbia can only lose from resolving the status of Kosovo, and can only gain from the normalization of relations. In Brussels, they are aware that the entire political structure of the EU for solving disputed issues in the Western Balkans, especially regarding Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia, entered a dead end at the moment when it became clear that negotiations on EU membership are not an instrument for the former republics Yugoslavia and Albania reach European standards, but their entry into the EU should be postponed for as long as possible.
President Vučić again spun a vague story about an "innovative solution" for Kosovo during the meeting with Emmanuel Macron in the Elysée Palace. Aside from the fact that Paris is the wrong address for promoting that idea - in the West there are only two valid addresses, Washington and Berlin, where one could talk about "innovative solutions" for Kosovo - Belgrade can only look for an "innovative way" to recognize or renounce Kosovo.
On the other hand, by forcing a dialogue with Pristina, under the auspices of the EU, Belgrade can do a lot to normalize relations with the former province. Such a development of events would allow Belgrade to transfer the hot potato of Kosovo to the backyard of Washington, Berlin and Brussels with a principled position: "We normalize and regulate our relations with Pristina, and you see how Kosovo will become a member of the United Nations and initiate Euro-Atlantic integration, Serbia does not the right of veto in the UN Security Council, and it is not even a member of the EU or NATO to be able to block Kosovo".
Apart from Pristina, the inclusion of the Western Balkans on the priority list of topics between Biden and Merkel generated great enthusiasm in Sarajevo as well. In the Bosniak-Bosnian political bloc, they are convinced that the Biden administration will open the door to the abolition of the entity and the creation of a unitary and pseudo-civil state in which those who do not share their vision of the former central republic of SFRY would be the majority.
For the leaders of the parties with headquarters in the BiH capital, the way Milo Đukanović's regime interpreted the form of the civil state in Montenegro is the ideal they still strive for. This is exactly why the party leaders and the media in Sarajevo reacted so violently and maliciously to the democratic changes that the citizens of Montenegro had been waiting for for 30 years, targeting Dritan Abazović and Ur.
The new occupant of the White House cannot do anything more that he could not do during Obama's tenure. On the contrary, Biden, as vice president, dealt mainly with Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans, which he will certainly not be able to do as president, bearing in mind a series of large problematic files on the domestic and international level, far more important than ours in the Western Balkans.
In the next four years, the new administration in Washington will not do much on internal reforms in BiH, but there will be a significant acceleration of Sarajevo's path to NATO membership. It is not excluded that BiH will become a member of the North Atlantic Alliance by the end of Biden's mandate.
Angela Merkel is at the end of her fourth term, and since she will not be running for another chancellor term, her capacity to influence local rulers in the former Yugoslavia and Albania has been reduced to courtesies and finery. The chancellor knows she can't ask for much, and local leaders are aware that they don't have to give much because September is here, almost around the corner.
It is illusory to hope for French President Emmanuel Macron as a sponsor of EU enlargement. In France, you cannot win elections on Balkan issues, but you can lose them. In translation, any success in the Western Balkans would not bring more votes to the French president in his attempt to secure a second term in the Elysée Palace. Any indulgence by Macron towards our region would lead him to a slippery slope because when the French hear about the Western Balkans, the first associations are crime and EU expansion, extremely unpopular arguments in the Fifth Republic.
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