Notes on the Balkans

Some observations after my week in Serbia.

If I had to reduce my Serbia observations into a single image, it would be the picture right above this text. As part of an academic delegation across the country, we sampled a lot of local cuisine. In Serbia that usually included a “groaning piles of grilled meat” dish. And my thoughts about Serbia and U.S. foreign policy in the region parallel my thoughts about that dish of meat after a six-day trip: Serbia proved to be a more appetizing and intriguing place than I would have believed a month ago. That said, after a week of unrelenting protein I began to doubt the long-term sustainability of that kind of diet.

[Really? You decided to go full Tom Friedman in this post? Really?!—ed. Look, there was a lot of meat, okay? Let me have some fun with this.]

As great power competition has heated up, lots of commentators have noticed how Serbia has exploited its position to try and curry favor — and favors — from multiple great powers. The European Union and United States want Serbia to gravitate further towards the West. Russia wants Serbia to rekindle its Slavic ties and remember that whatever Russia has done, it has not bombed Belgrade in the past few decades. China wants to befriend a European country that is neither a NATO nor a Eurasian Union member. One observer in Belgrade told me that Chinese embassy officials have been tasked to double their trade levels with Serbia in the next few years.

For many Western observers, the concern is that Serbia’s foreign policy will begin to follow shifts in Serbian public opinion. Nominally, Serbia is a candidate for EU membership, but Brussels has been slow-rolling the negotiations for close to a decade. The biggest sticking point — Serbian recognition of Kosovo — remains a no-go for Belgrade.¹ The result of this deadlock is that Serbian public opinion has trended in an anti-European, pro-Russian direction over the past decade or so. As one Serbia political observer put it, “The Ottoman Empire is more popular than the EU in Serbia.”²

Indeed, for all the concerns about Russian soft power poisoning Serbian public opinion against the West — and given the availability of Sputnik news there, I get the reasons for concern — the simple fact is that the politics of memory mean the Russians don’t have to do much to entice Serbian affection. This is a country that has consciously chosen not to repair multiple buildings bombed by NATO back in 1999. The Serbian sense of geopolitical grievance has been cultivated for decades. At least one nationalist think tank in Belgrade speculated out loud that if Russia defeated Ukraine, there would be a “land bridge” to Russia through Hungary.

That said, the fundamental reality for Serbia is that its primary economic relationship is with the European Union, and it is pretty damn important.