Irredentism is not limited to Russia

I am pleased to publish this piece, which I co-authored with SAIS colleague Sinisa Vukovic:

One of us has been critical of US State Department praise for President Vucic of Serbia. Some American diplomats are accepting the notion that he is genuinely pro-European and concerned only with the welfare of Serbs in neighboring countries. That is a mistake, especially in the midst of the Ukraine war. His reasoning about Serbia’s responsibilities and relations with its neighbors bears a distinct resemblance to Vladimir Putin’s justifications for aggression:

– Protection of ethnic kin, based on the assumption that the President of Russia or Serbia is responsible to defend Russians or Serbs wherever they live.

– Exaggeration of the threats Russians/Serbs face in other countries and calls for preventive action, including interference in the internal politics of neighboring countries.

– Use of gross disinformation to exaggerate urgency, while attributing the reports to others so as to maintain plausible deniability.

– Exploitation of the Orthodox Church to claim ethnic unity in the face of alleged religious persecution.

– Abuse of linguistic identity to claim that anyone who speaks Russian/Serbian is protected by Moscow/Belgrade.
These and other examples indicate that Vucic, like Putin, rejects civic identities and the notion that sovereignty stops at a state’s borders.

Vucic has moved definitively away from liberal democracy and back towards repressive ethnonationalism. The press is not free in Serbia and dissent is increasingly perilous. Vucic has befriended Vladimir Putin, refused to align with EU sanctions on Russia, and even now is allowing Air Serbia to double service Moscow. Vucic claims to support Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, as he must because of Serbia’s claims to Kosovo, but he is doing little to support Kyiv.

Like Putin, who advocates a “Russian world,” Vucic has also attached himself to people who believe in creating a broader ethnonationalist polity than the territory Serbia currently occupies, the “Serbian world.” He habitually refers to his own role vis-a-vis “Serbs” (Serbi) not Serbians or citizens of Serbia (Srbijanci).

Here is some of the evidence for Vucic’s irredentist ambitions:

Serbian world

September 26, 2020, (then) Minister of Defense Aleksandar Vulin started talking it up:

Vucic must create the Serbian world. Belgrade must gather in itself and around itself all Serbs, and the President of Serbia is the President of all Serbs.

(Vučić treba da stvara srpski svet. Beograd mora da u sebi i oko sebe okupi sve Srbe, a predsjednik Srbije je predsjednik svih Srba)

On April 9, 2021, Vulin specified:

Current geopolitical circumstances do not favor the idea of unification of all areas where Serbs live, but this will inevitably happen in ten, twenty or fifty years…wherever they live, in Serbia, Montenegro, Republika Srpska. What we need is the situation where the care for all Serbs, wherever they live, is managed from one center, and that is Belgrade, and I see nothing controversial about it.

During his party convention, July 18, 2021, Vulin explained the rationale behind Serbian world:

The people that has experienced genocide in Jasenovac, that has experienced Oluja [the Croatian military Operation Storm in 1995], and the March pogrom [in 2004 in Kosovo] does not have the right to surrender its fate to the hands of others, that others decide about the future of their children. People whose experience postulates that when it does not have its own soldier, its own police officer, its own judge, it does not have the rights…Serbia needs to have an army that can defend Serbia and Serbs wherever they live.

Effectively, he is calling for protection of Serbs by creation of Greater Serbia, the idea that drove Slobodan Milosevic to war at least four times.

On the same day Vucic reacted:

The official state policy is that Serbia’s state borders are inviolable, and we do not care about others’ borders. We have to protect our own, and unequivocally demonstrate what is our policy.

No doubt having gotten an earful from Western diplomats, Vucic backed off a bit the next September:

In that notion [Serbian world] there is nothing threatening, nothing that would endanger anyone else… it does not talk about borders or anything else, and besides, it is not part of the official state policies.

But it is

It is state policy and Vucic must know it. The National Security Strategy of the Republic of Serbia, that the Parliament adopted in December 2019, is centered around the following premise:

Protection of sovereignty and territorial integrity, military neutrality, safeguard of Serbian people outside of the Republic of Serbia’s borders, European integration, and efficient rule of law

(očuvanje suverenosti i teritorijalne celovitosti, vojna neutralnost, briga o srpskom narodu van granica Republike Srbije, evropske integracije i efikasna pravna država)

Regarding the safeguard of Serbian people living outside of Serbia’s borders, the Strategy specifies it “is an existential matter for the survival of the Republic of Serbia.”  

It’s dangerous to Bosnia, Montenegro, and Kosovo

The same Strategy also exclaims:

Preservation of Republika Srpska is one of the foreign policy priorities of the Republic of Serbia

(“Očuvanje Republike Srpske jedan je od spoljnopolitičkih prioriteta Republike Srbije”)

To explain what is meant by this, Vulin (again as MoD) stated in May 2019:

Republika Srpska has always been a priority of the Government and the President of the Republic of Serbia. Republika Srpska may not have its own army, but Serbian people heve their own army.

(“Republika Srpska je uvek prioritet politike Vlade i predsednika Republike Srbije. Republika Srpska nema svoju vojsku, ali srpski narod ima svoju vojsku.”)

This is essentially a pledge to intervene militarily in Bosnia if the RS is threatened, something Milosevic declined to do.

Vucic agrees:

We are one people, as President Milorad Dodik said. There is no such thing as Croatian Serbs or Bosnian Serbs. My father is not a Bosnian Serb, he is a Serb. He may be from Bosnia, but he is not any other Serb but only a Serb.

The threat to intervene is not only against Bosnia. Responding to Montenegrin President Djukanovic’s accusations that Serbia is expansionist, Vucic stated:

Djukanovic should know that I will always defend Serbs, and I will always defend Serbia. I have not alternative, but my own country and my own people

On Kosovo, the risk is even clearer: Vucic mobilized the Serbian army when Kosovo insisted on implementation of an agreement concerning cross-boundary/border recognition of license plates (!).

Serbia is serious

I take Serbia seriously. Its vast re-armament (with Russian and Chinese as well as Western weapons) serves its national security purposes, which are clearly not limited to the current territory of Serbia. No one watching Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine should fail to recognize the risks in the Balkans.