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.

Alternation in power will require that Montenegro’s governing institutions be stronger and more professional than they are today. I trust that will be one of the outcomes of the EU accession process. You need a professional civil service that will carry on implementation of the acquis communautaire no matter who comes to power at the political level. The judicial authorities will be particularly important: they need to be independent and prepared to stand up to political pressures.

This internal strengthening will take time, energy and patience. Montenegro has some fabulously well-educated people who have carried the country a long way in the right direction, but political winds still buffet both its institutions and civil society, which struggles to achieve real independence.

In the region, Montenegro plays a role much greater and more exemplary role than its small population would suggest. It is consistently the most successful multiethnic state emerging from former Yugoslavia. It has managed its relations with the West and an increasingly aggressive Russia skillfully. And it has also maintained good relations with its nearest neighbors: Kosovo, Albania, Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as Slovenia, Italy and the rest of the European Union. No one wants to recreate former Yugoslavia, but all of the Balkans would benefit from much closer relations within the region, especially on creating the physical and financial infrastructure that will enable trade and investment to flow easily from country to country. I know nothing about the contracting process or the quality of the construction, which I gather are issues here, but the road to Bar is an important part of that picture.

What, people in the Balkans always want to know, about the United States? For two decades Washington has appreciated Montenegro’s courage in choosing a Western orientation and rejecting the exclusivist and autocratic nationalism of Milosevic as well as Putin. But Washington is not today focused on the Balkans. The Council on Foreign Relations each year prepares a list of 30 contingencies that might affect U.S. national security or the security of its most important allies. None of those contingencies are ever in the Balkans. Washington looks to Brussels to do the heavy lifting in this region. Only a major episode of instability would change that attitude.

That said, Montenegro’s entry into NATO will provide enormous opportunities for Podgorica to contribute to the Alliance’s now vast area of operations. Montenegro’s armed forces already maintain a superb partnership with the state of Maine. As a NATO member, it may be called upon to do much more in the future. Those who have enjoyed the privileges of a relatively smooth transition to democracy and independence owe to others a helping hand, at the least in preventing state collapse and violent extremism.

I’m sure there are those in Montenegro who are today wondering whether Europe will be ready when Montenegro is. Today’s Europe is suffering. Recession, demographic implosion, refugee influx, and euro doubts are generating fear, nativism and xenophobia.  There is no guarantee that the Union will want to expand any time soon, though I take it as a good sign that negotiations are continuing despite the prevailing political winds. Just as with NATO, wise people in Brussels will eventually realize that Montenegro is no burden on the Union and its accession would help generate the kind of pro-European momentum needed in Serbia, Macedonia, Kosovo and Bosnia.

The fact is you are significant despite your size and geographical isolation. Montenegro is a Balkans success story: you avoided war when other multiethnic societies descended into the maelstrom, you chose to distance yourselves from a much larger and more powerful Serbia under Milosevic, you decided on independence peacefully and democratically, you have qualified for NATO membership and begun to negotiate EU accession. If the next 10 years are as successful as the last 10, you will be not only become a NATO member with deployments around the world but also an EU member with a far higher GDP than you enjoy today. Your politics will be competitive, your media free, your justice system independent and your civil service professional. You will not be immune to scandal, but your institutions will handle it with due process. Your society will remain stable, open and dynamic.

Few countries in the Balkans or anywhere on earth can boast such hopes. Montenegro has good reason to be proud, and even more reason to continue on the path it has chosen.