In practice, they wish to return the European and Euro-Atlantic integration train to its starting settings and to break up its collective decision-making system into several potentially opposed poles, from Paris, Berlin and London to Ankara. Yet none of the introductory speakers asked what follows after that.
Under the auspices of two political news portals, “Sve o Srpskoj” and “Fakti,” as well as the representation of the Bosnia and Herzegovina entity Republika Srpska in Serbia, a nationalist intellectual elite gathered in Belgrade at the beginning of this week. They were joined by Milorad Dodik, the contractor for operational works, for a panel titled “The War in Ukraine: What Serbian Neutrality Means.” Besides Dodik, who came to draw on the wisdom of the “thinking elite,” the participants were Milomir Stepić, Miloš Ković, Dragomir Anđelković, Goran Petronijević, Darko Tanasković, Nenad Kecmanović, Aleksandar Pavić, Predrag Ćeranić, Željko Budimir, Slobodan Reljić and Đuro Bilbija, in precisely that order.
The Geopolitics of the “Serbian World”
Under conditions unfavorable to Serbia, this group of Serbian intellectuals consensually recommended strategic “patience,” “waiting for the denouement,” “hiding below the radar,” “quiet resistance,” “various forms of obstruction,” a combination of “military and political neutrality,” “strengthening combat readiness,” and the like. In their view, the “Serbian World” has ample reason to heed the warning of the Russian imperial intelligence officer Aleksei Yedrikhin that “nothing is worse than the enmity of the Anglo-Saxons except their friendship.” In its rivalry with America, they noted, Serbia should also count on the concrete support of opposing systemic powers, above all Russia, which in any case corresponds to their ideological worldview. When the Russians “pass Odesa” and “reach the Danube delta,” which this group of seers considers a foregone conclusion, that will be the moment for a Serbian geopolitical reversal: the “symbolic turning of Primakov’s aircraft above the Atlantic,” which, like Serbia, was flying west.
More troubling still, Kecmanović, Ćeranić, Bilbija and their company already see Russian tanks “on the Hungarian border,” the “collapse of the existing European order,” and the “creation of a multipolar Europe,” divided and subordinated to Eurasian powers. In their vision of the European security architecture there is no place for NATO, within which Serbia’s small and weak neighbors enjoy collective protection. The Balkans will no longer be an “American and British hunting ground.” With the strengthening of the “Serbian World” from Banja Luka and Podgorica to Belgrade, Serbia will await “the beginning of the dismantling of American hegemony.” Bosnia and Herzegovina, which they describe as a “colony” or “temporarily occupied,” could end up once again in the condition in which it found itself in 1918. Without American support, the “Izetbegovićs” and the “Đukanovićs” will be merely “ridiculous clowns.”
Such ideas, advanced by Bilbija, Ković, Kecmanović and their like-minded colleagues, cannot be countered with the progressive ideals of the liberal West. That is simply not possible, because their nationalist minds are so steeped in primordial notions of blood and soil that no persuasion can reach them. Their perception of reality, limited by their own prejudices as well as by Greater Serbian ideology, merits only one lesson: the realpolitik one that they understand best. This is the language of material power, in which their delusions can be transparently measured and compared.
Dismantling a Geopolitical Illusion
First, the participants in the panel uncritically glorify the strength of Russia. This imperial power, they claim, will soon reach the borders of the Balkans and then attack, in turn, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Albania, Greece, and so on. In the end it will prevail and change the existing world order, that is, “close the page opened by Peter the Great.” Yet the same group passes over the material fact that Russian GDP is comparable to that of New York, or smaller than that of a single EU member such as Italy, or smaller than German GDP by an astonishing 2,500 billion US dollars. The United States is not a “declining power,” as they triumphantly repeat; rather, the Russian Federation is in free fall, given publicly available demographic and economic indicators. When the renowned American professor John Mearsheimer, who justifies Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine, says that Russia is merely “a big gas station,” he too illustrates the fundamental difference between an objective assessment of reality and the distorted one offered by the speakers at the Belgrade gathering.
Second, beyond the parrot-like repetition that the world is already multipolar, Belgrade offers only a louder silence about the fact that America spends twelve times more on defense than the Russian Federation. Can poles really differ so greatly? If one takes into account the military expenditure of American allies in the European and Indo-Pacific systems, the strategic advantage can only be larger. Of the fifteen countries with the highest military spending in the world, eleven are security partners of the United States. Neither Russia nor China has formal allies among the top fifteen, nor does any of their allies believe that a military attack on one is an attack on all. America’s latent power is even more pronounced when one considers another important factor, soft power, which the panelists also mention, though timidly. Unfortunately for them, the leading positions in global rankings such as the Soft Power 30 are occupied by democratic states. France, which Đuro Bilbija mocks with quotations from a Russian consul’s dispatch that “the whole of Versailles reeks and the French emperor stinks like a goat,” ranks first, while Russia ranks last.
Third, the gathering sent the message that the West has for a quarter of a century existentially threatened the Bosnia and Herzegovina entity of Republika Srpska. Yet all of them pass over the strategic benefits that Serbs and Russians derived from American liberal interventionism. Russia has forgotten the enormous financial assistance it received from the West after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which helped preserve its internal economic and political stability. Bosnian Serbs have forgotten that, at the request of the West, the military offensive in Krajina was halted in September 1995, when the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in coordination with the Croatian Army, stood at the threshold of Banja Luka. American liberal interventionism also persuaded Ukraine in 1994, in line with Russia’s vital interests at the time, to renounce the nuclear weapons it had inherited after the dissolution of the USSR. Without American leadership, Ukraine would probably have reasoned differently. A statement by the then Ukrainian defense minister, Konstantin Morozov, confirms this: “Ukraine would pose a threat to no one if, hypothetically, it possessed tactical nuclear weapons.” The 42nd President of the United States, Bill Clinton, also writes about Western support for Russia in that period in his article in The Atlantic, titled “I Tried to Put Russia on Another Path.”
Fourth, the introductory speakers were in general agreement that the current battle for Donbas is in fact a battle for the Balkans, as though the two formed a single geopolitical space. On the political map of the world, Ukraine is indeed one of those states with an unenviable position. Geographically, it lies on the periphery of the system of collective Euro-Atlantic security, which is an aggravating circumstance. Ukraine also shares more than two thousand kilometers of land and maritime border with the Russian Federation. Harsh political realism most often denies such states the sovereign right to choose their own fate or allies against the will of an aggressive neighbor. However, much to the regret of the aforementioned “strategists” and “thinkers,” the “Serbian World” does not, by its geography, lie on the periphery of the European collective security system. With the enlargement of NATO beyond the Iron Curtain in the late 1990s and early 2000s, that geopolitical space became part of a much larger security system, even though Serbia remains formally outside full membership. It is also important to bear in mind that the United States has been present on European soil since the end of the Second World War and has no intention of leaving.
Fifth, the participants in the Belgrade gathering do not hide their wish to turn back the historical clock: to see the liberal democracies of Europe replaced by authoritarian, nationalist regimes, and the same company of elderly men to witness the restoration of spheres of influence, the larger of which would fall to Russia and the somewhat smaller to Serbia. In practice, they wish to return the European and Euro-Atlantic integration train to its starting settings and to break up its collective decision-making system into several potentially opposed poles, from Paris, Berlin and London to Ankara. Yet none of the introductory speakers asked what follows after that. Nor did any of them consider how the forces opposing this project would act, above all America and its European allies, which by all measurable and relevant parameters are roughly ten times stronger than Russia.
Sixth, let us suppose for a moment that the illusions of Tanasković, Kecmanović and company become reality: that “time is working for them,” that the Euro-Atlantic order is collapsing, that the United States is withdrawing from Europe. According to their realpolitik conception, states geographically closer to Russia should lie exclusively within the Russian zone of responsibility. However, Serbia does not border Russia. The “sharp minds” of Serbia have not clearly explained how, if the fundamentals of geopolitics are respected, the “Serbian World” would become part of the “Russian World” alongside, for example, a “Germanic” or a “Turkish” one. They themselves stated that Germany is now rebuilding the “Wehrmacht,” which they merely call the “Bundeswehr,” and is legitimizing a new approach in the Balkans. They did not mention Serbia’s pathological fear of Turkey, whose drones burn and scorch Russian tanks from Nagorno-Karabakh through Syria to Ukraine. Finally, what are we to make of Bosnian, Albanian or Montenegrin nationalism and patriotism, which would meet any eventual expansion of the “Serbian World” with rifle fire? Nor would there be any shortage of Javelins and Stingers.
Nor did we hear how the Russian pole would treat the “freedom-loving” ideas of Serbia within the Russian gravitational field, however large Serbia might be. Will Russia treat a “freedom-loving” Serbia in its zone of interest as it treated Tito’s Yugoslavia in 1948, a freedom-loving Hungary in 1956, or a freedom-loving Czechoslovakia in 1968? It is clear that great powers, as a rule, do what they wish, while the weaker suffer what they must. None of this was mentioned, just as there was no mention of how Russia withdrew its military forces from Kosovo in 1999, thereby abandoning Serbia and enabling Kosovo’s de facto independence.
Seventh, the alternative multipolar Europe advocated by the company from the Belgrade podium, as well as by the Russian political elite in the Kremlin or by European right-wing parties such as the National Front in France, Alternative for Germany, the Danish People’s Party or the Freedom Party of Austria, may stem from different motivations and pursue different means and goals. Nevertheless, their sovereigntist inclination to dissolve NATO suggests, by the logic of that same realism, the emergence of a new anarchic order with several mutually opposed poles, maintaining peace in Europe only through a policy of balance of power. How a multipolar Europe ended in the past is not unknown from the historical perspective. A liberal, green, social-democratic and Christian-democratic Europe, in short the majority of Europe, does not want such a fate. It wants strong institutions, the rule of law and the continuation of an integrative political culture, such as the Euro-Atlantic order offers. Central and Eastern European states in particular do not wish to end up as a peripheral zone, like present-day Ukraine, where security is deficient. Why do Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia prefer American liberal hegemony? Because they had an unfortunate historical experience in the embrace of Russian authoritarian hegemony.
Finally, an attentive listener could not fail to notice the general consensus and uniformity of thought among so many “thinking” people. It turned out that some had spent decades of academic work only to agree on everything about such an important topic. One thing is nonetheless encouraging: as long as such Serbian intellectuals remain this overconfident, the Balkan region has far better prospects.
