|
Hoyt Yee, the deputy assistant secretary of State
whose bailiwick includes the Balkans, said yesterday
in Belgrade that Serbia “cannot sit on two chairs at the same time.”
He was referring to Belgrade’s efforts to both accede to the EU and
maintain close relations with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. These goals
are just too far apart, he suggested.
I agree, but the question arises: why would anyone
in a country that needs economic and political reform latch on to
Moscow? Russia has an economy the size of Spain’s (with Catalonia)
and a political system that resorts to prosecution and assassination
to eliminate competition. While the Russian military has enjoyed
some success in its interventions in Ukraine and Syria, it has
nowhere near the capacity the West has to protect its friends and
allies. Russia is a declining regional power, one heavily dependent
on hydrocarbons rather than a diversified economy.
There are nevertheless people in Serbia who feel
they need “the warm embrace of the Russian bear,” as one of them put
it to me. “When,” he asked, “was the last time an American president
visited Belgrade?” I didn’t know it at the time, but the correct
answer seems to be Jimmy Carter, in 1980. That is indeed a long time
ago. President Trump has allegedly promised to visit next year.
What does the warm Russian embrace entail? While
fundamentally a political link, Belgrade’s affection for Moscow also
entails military cooperation, economic interests, and Slavic
cultural affinity. The Russians have given Serbia MiGs, involved
Serbia in military exercises, and established a “humanitarian”
logistics base near Nis. They prevent Kosovo from entering the
United Nations. They have also taken possession of much of the
Serbian energy sector. Belgrade might prefer F16s, but Washington
doesn’t give them away, and lack of appropriate pipelines hinders
efforts to wean Serbia from Russian gas. Russia Today and Sputnik
News are making big efforts to sustain the long history of Slavic
brotherhood with Serbia, not to mention the efforts of the Serb and
Russian Orthodox Churches.
The Russian embrace also entails acceptance of
Putin’s governing norms. They include assassination. Last year,
Moscow attempted to mount, through Serbia, an assassination plot
against Montenegrin Prime Minister Djukanovic, a good friend of
Vucic. To his enormous credit, Vucic not only helped to foil the
plot but also provided vital testimony as to its reality. Fear of
such an attempt in Serbia is motive enough for some politicians to
hedge their bets.
But they have other reasons too. The reforms the
European Union seeks as a condition for accession require political
leaders to do difficult things that block at least some of the
corruption endemic to the Balkans. At least one Balkan leader, Ivo
Sanader (erstwhile prime minister of Croatia) found himself
arrested, tried, and convicted as a consequence of the judicial
reforms for which he himself was responsible. The “Sanader effect”
has made other Balkan leaders extra cautious about judicial
independence and anti-corruption prosecutions.
President Vucic, who has repeatedly won elections
on a pro-EU platform, would make an enormous mistake not to opt for
the EU chair, though in doing so he will need to give up his control
of the press and accept a far more independent judiciary ready to
take on corruption and other official malfeasance. Those are not
easy things for a former Information Ministry in a Milosevic
government to do. Some bad habits are so ingrained they are hard to
break, even if you in principle want to do so. I even wonder whether
the Serbian media and courts would believe Vucic if he were to
signal clearly that he was surrendering his influence over them.
That however is what he needs to do, not to please
me or Hoyt Yee but to enable Serbia to emerge as a real and liberal
democracy politically more tied to the EU and far less to the
Russian bear.
|
