Serbia and Europe, at risk

Sonja Biserko, President of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia and the Eric Lane Fellow at Clare College, University of Cambridge, and Josip Glaurdic, the Junior Research Fellow at Clare College, write:

In an expression of the real spirit of Serbia, Tomislav Nikolić won the presidential election on a wave of popular discontent thanks to a series of blunders by former President Tadić’s Democratic Party.  The conservative segment of Serbia’s society and a consolidated populist right are the beneficiaries.  The result presents a potentially momentous challenge for Serbia, its neighbors, and the whole of Europe.  With Nikolić at its helm, Serbia is now an unreliable partner, save perhaps for Putin’s Russia.

Nikolić’s victory and the strong showing of his Serbian Progressive Party in earlier parliamentary elections have brought the decade-long efforts to keep Serbia on a Euroatlantic course into question.  Serbia’s contemporary political climate and its political culture have demonstrated the low achievement of its democratic transition.  Since the fall of Slobodan Milošević in October 2000, Serbia has not achieved political consensus regarding its future or its strategic orientation.

In spite of efforts in Brussels to spin Serbia’s electoral results into a “victory of pro-European forces,” these electoral results have exposed as perilously fragile the political engineering that has tried to bind Serbia into European integration.  What Serbs term the “grey zone” of their politics – the security apparatus, the current and former military brass, the nationalist intelligentsia – abandoned Tadić because it wanted to slow down Serbia’s European integration and halt the process of coming to terms with Serbia’s recent past.  The grey zone will now seek to slow democratic reforms and normalization of relations with the rest of the region.  Serbia’s dialogue with Kosovo, its  judicial, military, and police reforms, its cooperation with NATO and integration with the EU–already sluggish–will grind to a halt.

The president-elect rushed to announce that his foreign policy will be “both Russia and the EU,” that he will never recognize Kosovo, that he recognizes Montenegro but not the Montenegrins as a nation, and that Serbia does not want NATO membership. His recent statements to Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung recalling Serb ambitions he supported  to take Croatian territory serve as a potent reminder of the tragic policies of the 1990s, which could revive under his leadership.

Tadić’s loss jeopardizes the Democratic Party, which faces an identity and leadership crisis similar to the one it faced after the assassination of its leader and Serbia’s Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić in 2003. The Democratic Party could be irreparably damaged as an organizational foundation for reform.  The further slowdown, or even reversal, of Serbia’s democratic transformation could frustrate consolidation and democratization in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Montenegro and even cause regional instability.

A great deal depends on the stance of the EU and the Unites States.  The electoral results were an indirect consequence of a subtle, but noticeable, policy shift in Brussels and Washington. The appeal of Tomislav Nikolić among centrist voters (which, at the very least, led to their decision to abstain from voting) arguably had a lot to do with Western signals of approval of his possible victory and of his supposed transformation from a nationalist radical into a pro-European conservative.

Those in Western capitals who crafted such a policy shift seem not to have learned much from recent history. They are bound to be disappointed by Nikolić, just as they were let down by their two other notable “projects” – Serbia’s former Prime Minister Vojislav Koštunica and President of Republika Srpska Milorad Dodik.  Serbia and Europe will have to live with Nikolić as president for at least the next five years. If its relationship with Tadić was difficult because of his inability to shed nationalist ballast, Brussels is in for an even more frustrating ride with Nikolić.

European leaders will still have to rise to the challenge and offer a real path to EU integration for all the countries of the Western Balkans, and especially for Serbia’s neighbors. Only a strategy which continuously supports the accession process can ensure that the region, no matter how slowly, moves forward and that the EU maintains its position of influence.

Any sign of a decline in commitment to enlargement by the EU capitals lowers the Union’s influence and, thus also the influence of the truly pro-European forces in politics and society.  This could have even more devastating consequences for the democratization and stabilization of the whole region than the election of Tomislav Nikolić.