Serbia stuck between the "false friends" of Russia and the EU

Stuck between false friends" - that's the title of an article in a respected Swiss newspaper that talks about the position of the Western Balkans between the West and the East.

"On one side stands Russia, whose role is increasingly reduced to undermining or at least slowing down the region's ties to the West, like a party breaker. On the other hand, the European Union, with its endless highly formalized integration process, simulates an interest in the region that has long since ceased to exist," he writes in Andreas Ernst, who was a correspondent from Belgrade for many years, knew the Balkans very well.

Caught in this intermediate state, the societies of the Balkans seem paralyzed. Under the tutelage of authoritarian leaders, local economies are stagnating, and educated youth are moving to the West en masse.

Albanian intellectual Ramzi Lani sarcastically pointed out: "The transition is over. Not, as we hoped, from dictatorship to democracy, but from repression to depression."

Ernst goes on to write that the biggest move is the resolution of the Macedonian name issue, but that there are indications of a shift between Belgrade and Pristina. The basis of this is the principled agreement of the two presidents, Aleksandar Vucic and Hashim Thaci, that a sustainable reconciliation of Serbs and Albanians is better than a frozen conflict. To that end, the Swiss newspaper writes, Vučić and Thači "released a trial balloon: the idea of ​​an exchange of territories", which met with mixed reactions in the West.

But the author was interested in the reaction of Moscow. "Until recently, Putin used to tell his Serbian interlocutors that 'there can be no greater Serb' than themselves. In other words: he guarantees that he will oppose Kosovo's independence only as long as the Serbs oppose it. But then last autumn, in a private conversation with Putin, Vučić's idea of ​​a territorial compromise failed. Putin, as reported by Maksim Samorukov from the Moscow Carnegie Center, rejects trade that ends with the recognition of Kosovo's independence."

Behind that, writes Ernst, lies Russia's intention that Serbia - and especially Vučić - remain in the arms of the Kremlin. "The Serbian leadership has become hostage to the pro-Russian euphoria that since the XNUMXs has celebrated friendship with its bigger Slovenian brother. No Serbian politician is anywhere near as popular as Putin in his homeland. Vučić risks a conflict with the Kremlin if he unhesitatingly embarks on a course of reconciliation [with Pristina]. And that he can quickly finish him off politically with a big campaign. With the Serbian Church and in a large part of the nationalist public, any concessions on the Kosovo issue are considered treason to the state anyway."

"But why are the Europeans, above all Germany, standing in the way of the Tači and Vučić agreement?

Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev has the answer: 'Nowhere does Europe behave as ideologically as in the Balkans'.

This, Krastev believes, has to do with the self-perception of Europeans. "The Yugoslav wars determined the identity of Europeans more than anything else after the fall of the Wall". Milošević and other nationalist politicians from the Yugoslav space became a symbol of the 'Europe we don't want anymore' by their obsession with ethnic domination and the struggle for territories.

Noje cirher caitung writes that, after the victory over Serbia in 1999, it seemed that nationalism and border changes were defeated forever. "The European Union built itself as the champion of multi-ethnic democracy in the Balkans. In some EU countries, these ideas are held at all costs, even in the case of Kosovo, where this idea is a fiction. It is not easy to explain this ideological stubbornness. If it were to be abandoned for the sake of a more realistic assessment , that would be an admission that the project failed."

prepared Nemanja Rujevic