Podcast: "More correct to talk about EU failure"
Vuk Vuksanović on Serbia's Moscow/Brussels balancing act
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When 300,000 protestors took to the streets of Belgrade last weekend, something was missing. Serbs are as angry as Georgians with their corrupt and illiberal rulers but, unlike the daily demonstrations in Tbilisi, there were few (if any) anti-Russian banners and fewer blue-and-gold EU flags.
Serbia is unusual among the Western Balkan candidates for EU membership. Only a quarter century ago, it fought a war with nine union members over the secession of its Kosovo province, which went on to declare independence in 2008. Economically, Serbia needs the EU, but – with the status of Kosovo’s Serbs and culture still unresolved to its satisfaction – Belgrade relies on Russia for geopolitical support. But this two-way marriage of convenience shouldn’t be mistaken for love.
There is no “long historical tradition” that binds Russians and Serbs, writes Vuk Vuksanović in his new book – Serbia’s Balancing Act, published today by Bloomsbury. "It was not until the collapse of former Yugoslavia that the narrative of closeness between Serbs and Russians re-emerged". In reality, he argues, Russian-Serbian affinity mixes diplomatic expediency and culture-war identity and could fade once Belgrade and Pristina settle.
Serbian leaders “cannot accept the current state of affairs, so they need to kick the can down the road and hope the international environment can change to the extent that they can extract some concessions … which can be used as a face-saving settlement for their domestic audience,” Vuksanović tells me in a New Books Network podcast.
Despite the erosion of democracy under President Aleksandar Vučić, “we can draw certain lessons and insights from the fact that EU flags are not being waved around,” said Vuksanović. One is that leading EU figures have been “overly willing to embrace the incumbent regime for self-interest. I am a hard-nosed realist when it comes to foreign policy. It is one thing to cooperate with the government because you believe that they are the ones holding the power in a certain country, so you pragmatically have to engage with them. But it’s a completely different thing when, in early 2023, German MPs from the European Parliament vote in favour of a declaration which condemns the fraudulent elections, but a couple of weeks later, the German Chancellor comes and signs a lithium-exploitation deal with the incumbent government and drops democracy critiques. It is also quite a different thing when Ursula von der Leyen, at the moment when the country is burdened with protests over corruption, says in a press conference next to the Serbian president that the country has made democratic progress”.
“As I frequently say to my EU colleagues, it is much more correct to talk about EU failure rather than Chinese or Russian success. All these players are here in the Balkans primarily because you are not. You are there in terms of money, in terms of investments. But, in terms of serious political strategy and a serious political effort, you have been absent and you have been sleeping on the job for a very, very long time. Of course, while Serbia is certainly not the only country which can occasionally engage with non-Western powers, I would certainly say that this impulse for a multi-vector foreign policy is most powerfully pronounced in Belgrade”.
On the other side of the “balancing act”, the Russians know that Belgrade is “using them to get a better bargain from the West while the Serbs are always fearful that they will be nothing more than a bargaining chip in some hypothetical Great Power bargain between Russia and the Western powers. We can make a very precise definition of what are the most important things for Russia: Russia itself and countries on its immediate physical border. We have seen, since February 2022, how Russia has scaled down its security involvement and effectively condemned its allies in Syria and Armenia. So, compared to Syria and Armenia, Serbia is a very, very small fish”.
“Unlike the Americans, who have ventured into a whole set of theatres in the post-9/11 period and then got bogged down in a quagmire with everybody asking ‘where's the exit strategy?’, when the Russians go somewhere – whether it is militarily, diplomatically, or politically – they come with the idea: ‘okay, so we need to be here, but it will always be easy for us to pack if things really go sour. So, easy come, easy go”.
Vuk Vuksanović is a foreign policy expert at the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy and an associate of the Central and South-East Europe Programme at LSE IDEAS.
For my Writers’ Writers list, he chose Rival Power: Russia in Southeast Europe by Dimitar Bechev (Yale University Press, 2017) and Why War? by Christopher Coker (Hurst, 2021).