Rafael Jacob

What is the significance of Serbian election? I have been asked this by a lot of folks, so here is an unusually long post from me. The significance is... 1. ...That this happened before… 2. ...That you have no idea that it happened before… 3. ...And that the West messed it up the first time too. I am not an expert on Serbian politics. If you want to follow an actual legitimate expert, please follow Professor Dusan Pavlovic (@d_pavlovic) for proper analysis or my elementary school buddy Dimitrije Vojnov (@timjohnbyford) if you want the more anarcho-Hollywood commentary. Nonetheless, I was born in Belgrade, I left at 13 years old, and am a geopolitical/investment strategist by trade (basketball coach at heart). As such, lots of folks are asking me what is going on in Serbia and what I think about it. Well, here is what is going on… Serbia has yet again illustrated that it has the capacity for non-violent regime change. Incumbent leader Aleksandar Vucic conceded in a short and relatively sweet manner and the collective will of student protesters won. Pretty extraordinary outcome in today's jaded world. If this sounds vaguely familiar to you, it is because it also happened exactly 26 years ago, back in October 2000. Then, student protest movement OTPOR – in part led by dear friend @SrdjaPopovic – managed to do the unthinkable: use non-violent protest to topple the Slobodan Milosevic regime. The degree of difficulty then was higher than today. Say what you will about Vucic, but his government was not autocratic or engaged in military adventurism. But I don’t really want to talk about what happened in Serbia. I want to talk about how the West reacted to the extraordinary defeat of Milosevic in 2000 by a group of pro-West students. Instead of embracing the new government, it sought to force it into compliance with a deluge of conditionality. Sure, the incoming Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica was not aligned with Western liberal values, but this is Serbia 26 years ago! Did Belgrade get a pass after it just toppled, peacefully, the so-called "Butcher of Balkans?" No. It got criticized for everything from LGBTQ+ policy to foreign policy towards Moscow. As if the country was supposed to transition from Serbia to Vermont overnight! It was all sticks all the time, very few carrots for the war-weary country. The West then wrestled ~12% of Serbia’s territory – today’s Kosovo – without any real sweeteners and called the Belgrade government obstructionist for opposing it. I don’t want to get into debates of legality or normative justification for Kosovo independence. I think we can all simply agree that giving up ~12% of one’s territory is not an act most countries accept without some sort of constrenation. The US and the EU did not care. They gave Belgrade a fait accompli in a magnificent display of hegemonic arrogance. But hey, it was 2008... different world. Underpinning this attitude has long been a general sense of antagonism by the liberal West towards conservative Serbia. In the mind of many foreign policy elites - a generation of elite "experts" for whom the first taste of geopolitics came from the wars in Yugoslavia - Serbia and Serbs are and always will be the "bad guys." Belgrade, effectively, has had to pay the price for the 1990s, even once the regime that underwrote that aggressive policy of that terrible decade was peacefully and extraordinarily toppled in 2000. The incredible enthusiasm and pro-West sentiment of that youth - the youth that stared Milosevic regime right in the face with no fear - was ignored and wasted. Many of that youth is no longer pro-EU or pro-West. It is jaded, nihilist, and very bitter. I can see the same outcome on the horizon for Serbia today. The West is going to expect instant compliance, but 60% of Serbs do not want an antagonistic relationship with Russia. As such, expecting these students today to just throw away the country's relationship with Moscow is naive. Public support for accession to the EU is as low as 32%, according to some surveys, as high as a pathetic 45% in others. That is extremely low for a country that would objectively benefit from EU membership. The West’s brand has lost its luster. If the West wants Serbia to actually change its geopolitical direction, it’s going to have to pay for that shift. No, Serbia will again not become Vermont overnight. It won’t be a bastion of liberal thought or values. So what? Judging by election results in the West, doesn’t seem like this should be a problem, now should it? The West appears to have approximated Serbia over the past quarter century. So, all should be good, no? Serbia is also not going to give up its relationship with the Global South. Not unless Europeans and Americans pay for the shift. This is a multipolar world folks. If Belgrade stood by its geopolitical independence at the very height of American hegemony, the price for its compliance just went up, not down. You had your chance to "buy" Serbia cheap in 2000. If the students protesting in the streets of Belgrade listened to their game theory lessons, they should play hard-to-get this time around. What the reaction in the West should be – and should have been in 2000 – is to celebrate the example that Serbian students just set. French students should, especially, get to studying the example set by the Serbs. As should young people in the Global South, India and elsewhere. This kind of change takes hard work, concentration, and an iron will commitment to non-violence. Now two generations of Serbian students – the generation from the 1990s and now this one 25 years later – have shown the world how to do peaceful change. The question is not whether Serbs learned any lessons, but whether the West did. If the West actually cares which way Serbia leans – and it is not clear to me that it actually does – then it is going to have to stop trying to fight its own domestic ideological battles inside Serbian society. You want Belgrade to join the West? Then stop lecturing and start paying.