At a conference on Europe’s future held last October in Brussels, Robert Cooper, a high-level European Union foreign policy strategist, made an interesting observation. "I like the idea of 27 countries struggling to agree with each other. It is rather undignified, but it is a powerful message," he said.
Well, when it comes to the EU’s policy on Serbia and Kosovo, one can certainly agree with the "undignified" bit. Something of a low point was reached this week at the regular monthly meeting of EU foreign ministers. It produced an offer to Serbia of an "interim political agreement", dangling the carrots of freer trade, visa liberalisation and educational exchanges in the vague hope that this would cause Serb voters to back Boris Tadic, the moderate incumbent, in this weekend’s presidential election run-off.
Since I first lived in Belgrade in the late 1980s, everything I have learned about Serbian politics over the past 20 years has taught me that most Serbs are unlikely to take seriously such well-intentioned foreign attempts to guide them down the path of virtue.
There are good reasons why large numbers of Serb voters will vote for Tomislav Nikolic, Tadic’s ultra-nationalist challenger, and these reasons will apply no matter how much the EU tries to butter up the electorate from afar. They are the same reasons why Nikolic’s Serbian Radical Party, far from fading out of sight after Serbia’s disastrous military adventures in the 1990s, has in fact gone from strength to strength.
Serbs take the view that the collapse of communist Yugoslavia left them worse off than any other nationality once part of that state. From being top dogs in the multinational Yugoslav communist party, army and bureaucracy, they found themselves either penned into the smaller state of Serbia or converted into ethnic minorities in places such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Kosovo that claimed a right to independence.
This sense of victimhood persists and blends with more specific grievances about Kosovo. Here it is not so much a question of memories of the Ottoman defeat of the Serbs at the 1389 battle of Kosovo Polje, and all that supposedly implies about Serbia’s self-sacrifice on behalf of medieval Christendom.
It is more that, in the century following Serbia’s recovery of Kosovo in 1912, the ethnic Albanian component of the province’s population has increased to the point that most Serbs can see for themselves that, in demographic terms, the struggle is all but lost. This is a hammer blow to national identity and pride and very hard indeed to accept – even for Tadic and the relatively liberal modernisers in his circle.
The EU is therefore misguided if it thinks it can sugar the pill of Kosovo’s independence with the offer of visas and some subsidised schooling for Serbs at a German or Portuguese university. Possibly Tadic will just edge out Nikolic in the election run-off. But even Serbia’s "nice guys" cannot afford to be seen by their domestic audience to have given up on Kosovo under foreign pressure.
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