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Montenegro looks pretty good from DC

I  am speaking at the University of Montenegro in an hour or so. Here are my notes:

It is a great pleasure to be back in Montenegro. I enormously enjoyed my visit over the weekend to the coast, which I had never seen, with Sinisa Vukovic, a star professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Montenegro has exports it can be very proud of.

My last visit to Montenegro was well before independence, so this is a new country for me. I think you should be pleased with what you have achieved, but anxious to improve on it in the future. Let me explain.

Ten years of independence have wrought significant economic and political progress. Montenegro’s economic freedom score according to the Heritage Foundation has improved, even if rapid growth took a big hit from the 2008 financial crisis. Adoption of the euro as your currency has avoided many difficult issues, but also tied the country to Europe’s current recession and to a difficult competition with other producers within the eurozone. Democracy, while still a bit better than the Balkans average, has not improved overall according to Freedom House, even if the media have become more independent and the World Bank reports slowly improving government effectiveness, regulatory quality and rule of law.

Your country is a candidate for EU membership and seems to be progressing, even if slowly, in the accession process. NATO membership is imminent and most welcome. These are no small achievements. They bode well for the future. You need only look to nearby Macedonia to see what happens to a Balkan country that stalls in its progress towards Euroatlantic goals. The proverbial bicycle needs forward motion to prevent it from keeling over.

There are in my view two main obstacles blocking Montenegro’s bicycle path right now. There is no going around them. You have to clear them.

The first is rule of law. A weak judicial system has been unable to adequately counter organized crime, graft and other endemic forms of corruption, especially in public procurement and abuse of state institutions for political purposes. Major prosecutions are now ongoing, and I trust there will be more. I worry not when prosecutions happen but when they don’t. A year doesn’t go by in Washington DC without serious judicial accusations against two or three members of Congress, not to mention three or four governors in the rest of the country. I am pleased, not dismayed, when justice is done. I think you should be too. Not every prosecution will be successful, but every successful prosecution will be a warning to others.

The second major obstacle at the moment is the lack of a viable alternative to the main governing party. There has been no alternation in power since independence. While there are now small opposition forces that are Europe-focused, a big portion of the opposition has failed to detach itself from its Russian patron and end its campaign against independence. Montenegro needs a viable, constitutional, united Europe-focused alternative to your founding President and his dominant political party, who among other things have laudably earned allegiance from Montenegro’s substantial minorities.

The broad pro-independence coalition will not last forever, nor should it. At some point it will fragment—maybe that process has already started. This is a natural evolution that signals the beginning of the end of transition. It is necessary and unavoidable.

My saying this should not be interpreted as criticism of Prime Minister Djukanovic. To the contrary, he deserves a great deal of credit for the progress Montenegro has made, but it is time for Montenegro’s citizens to be thinking about how they can move beyond his long-dominant leadership to the normal democratic alternation in power of more conservative and more liberal political coalitions. Alternation in power cannot be done with an opposition that doesn’t accept the constitution of the state and seeks instead to create a greater Serbia, an idea defeated in four wars and during more than 16 years of peace. Nor can it be done with people who reject Montenegro’s European future and pine for a return to an alliance with Mother Russia. Read more