A summarised version of this interview is available in Serbian in Novi Magazin 652 of October 26, 2023. Here, exclusively for the web-site of Novi Magazin, is the full transcript of the talk.
S. G. Markovich:
Good evening Misha and Ivan, Thank you both for coming to Belgrade,
Allow me now to return to today’s event with our two very distinguished guests, Misha Glenny and Ivan Vejvoda, who have, for more than three decades, followed, witnessed and participated in some of the key events in Serbian, regional, European and global history. They have come all the way from Vienna to attend this event, and I would like to thank them very cordially for that.
Since its inception, the Belgrade Open School has focused on civic values and ways to introduce them to Serbia. One of the central topics has been the issue of Europe-Serbia relations and European integration. Even during the authoritarian regime in Serbia of the 1990s, when the country was isolated and without any EU prospects, the School persistently organised courses in European integration, although it still seemed as something very much beyond reach.
The course on European integration continued even during the NATO intervention in 1999 when the School had to change its location. It was during those tenebrous weeks that Ivan Vejvoda, our panellist today, lectured at the School. In the middle of his lecture on European integration, explosions were heard, and he famously said a sentence that keeps being repeated as an anecdote in the School ever since: „изгледа да се они не слажу са мном“ (“it seems that they do not agree with me”). At the end of his lecture, his mobile phone rang, and it turned out to be Misha Glenny, who is also today with us, and was then a famous BBC journalist who extensively covered the events in ex-Yugoslavia. He indeed was more than astonished to hear that Ivan was delivering a lecture on EU integration in Belgrade as the city was being bombed.
I chose to start with this anecdote because it connects the often tragic reality of this region with its European aspirations, and today’s event is indeed a special opportunity to discuss with our prominent guests the legacy of the recent past in Serbia and the region (in the first part of the talk), what has been achieved in the previous two decades in the efforts to transform Serbia, the region and post-communist Eastern Europe (in the second part), and, finally, in the third part of the event, regional, European and global challenges.
Allow me to first introduce our speakers.
To the right is Mr. Misha Glenny, who, since May 2022, has been the Rector of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna – IWM. He is an award-winning journalist, author, public figure, and intellectual. He covered the 1989 revolutions and wars in former Yugoslavia for The Guardian and was the BBC’s Central Europe Correspondent. His books The Fall of Yugoslavia, published in 1992 and 1993, and The Balkans 1804–1999. Nationalism, the War, and the Great Powers, published in 1999, have been widely read by all those interested in the history of the Balkans and Yugoslavia.
In recent years, Misha Glenny has focused on uncovering geopolitical and cyber-security issues. His books McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld and Dark Market: Cyber Thieves, Cybercops and You were shortlisted for several awards. McMafia has been adapted into a major television drama, and the adaptation of his latest book, Nemesis: One Man and the Battle for Rio, will follow soon. Five of his books have been translated into Serbian and published by B92-Samizdat and are available to domestic readers.
Glenny is also a regular contributor to major publications in Europe, North America and Japan and he advised many governments in the West on various political issues.
To the left is Ivan Vejvoda, a key figure in the democratic opposition movement in Yugoslavia during the 1990s. He has published extensively on the subjects of democratic transition, totalitarianism, and post-war reconstruction in the Balkans. He was an editor of well-known edition Libertas, specialised in political theory and democracy. He co-edited the books Yugoslavia and After and Democratization in Central and Eastern Europe.
Among the many duties he preformed, he was Executive Director of the Belgrade-based Fund for an Open Society from 1998 to 2002 and had a distinguished role in the Serbian government, serving as a senior advisor on foreign policy and European integration to Prime Ministers Zoran Djindjic and Zoran Zivkovic.
He was then the Senior Vice President for Programs at the German Marshall Fund (GMF) of the United States. From 2003 to 2010, he served as Executive Director of GMF’s Balkan Trust for Democracy, a project dedicated to strengthening democratic institutions in Southeastern Europe. Since 2017 he has been a Permanent Fellow of the Institute for Human Studies – IWM in Vienna, and Head of Europe’s Futures – Ideas for Action.
Our two guests followed, observed, and participated in the events in the region, but also followed European politics and transatlantic relations and witnessed many major events and processes of the contemporary world.
I will now move to the first part of today’s panel with a question to both panellists, on the legacy of the 1990s, a topic, you have both written about. In your opinion, as persons who witnessed events, discussed them with relevant regional and international actors, wrote about them, and organised conferences about the region in the 1990s, what is the legacy of those years now in the region? Ivan, may we start with you?
Ivan Vejvoda:
Thank you very much, Slobodan.
Congratulations on the 30th anniversary of BOŠ and it’s very moving to be reminded of the whole history, and of the events that we portrayed. Of course, I remember very well that that day when bombs were falling and we were talking about EU integration to the students of the Belgrade Open School in June 1999. And, of course, remembering Misha’s call that suddenly came at the end of the lecture asking how is it, are you surviving, you know, and what’s the output? As a dear friend, and I must say, I’ve known Misha thanks to Sonja Licht who introduced me to Misha, I think in 1989 or 1990, I can’t remember the exact year. So, we’ve been around all of us, and it’s very moving also to have seen a lot of friends and colleagues coming to this event. It makes it even more exceptional to have all of you here in the room.
So, without taking too long, I’ll mention some of the key things. We always must go back to 1989 and the fall of the [Berlin] wall which many countries understood was a turning point: the fall of communism, when countries in Eastern Europe claimed and wanted to return to Europe, as they were saying, and, at that same moment, Yugoslavia, that had relations with the European community, since I think the end of the 70s, and that seemed like the most likely and first candidate to join the Community, and later the Union, in fact took a dramatic and catastrophic turn that was exceptional to all other countries.
We were the proverbial car driving in the wrong direction on the highway. As the saying goes as there was a return to the end of history, but as Misha Glenny rightly put: there was rebirth of history happening in the worst way in this country. And that’s I think one of the strongest memories.
It was the end of three communist federations: the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. It happened in the worst way. It was the Milosevic’s 90s that left the catastrophic legacy of a criminalised society, and a criminalised state, but it was also a time of hope because there was a birth of civil society, there were the protests against the war, endless demonstrations since the early 90s, since the first attack on Dubrovnik by the Yugoslav People’s Army, the strikes at the University of Belgrade. Jumping over many events: the victory of the opposition in the local elections in 1996, the days and days of protests all over Serbia, and the victory in 55% of cities of Serbia that was a springboard towards the elections of 24th September 2000, and then 5th of October [2000] that we marked just a few days ago here in Belgrade.
I think that is something that we will always remember in these very bad and very good ways. Without taking too much longer I cannot fail to mention, Slobodan, that this place here is where the panels of “Druga Srbija” [“the Other Serbia”] took place in 1992-93, and people who come to mind, who are no longer with us, like Stojan Cerović or Vojin Dimitrijević, or Aljoša Mimica, were here to propose. Allow me just to say that “Druga Srbija”, which is so maligned among nationalistic circles, is nothing else than a democratic European Serbia. The struggles of the 90s were to instigate the rule of law, an open society that would become part of the European family while retaining the cultural, historical, religious, and other particularities of other societies. That’s what “the Other Serbia” was about, and I still think we’re in the same business.
S. G. Markovich:
So, Misha what do you say on the legacy of the 1990s as a writer of a history of the Balkans?
Misha Glenny:
First of all “Dobro veče svima” [“Good Evening to Everyone”]. It’s great to be back in Belgrade. I am not here often enough, but thank you very much for the invitation. Thanks to the Belgrade Open School. It’s a real pleasure to be on the stage here with Ivan and also I’m thrilled that Sonja Licht is in the audience as well, because most of what I have learned about this country and region comes from the two of them, so I blame them if I say anything stupid.
Ivan was extremely economical, I thought, with his answer and did a very good job. But the issue of the legacy is a very complicated question. I would like to pick up on one thing that he said about Yugoslavia being in a good position as we move towards 1989, possibly being considered for having a closer relationship with the European Union. I think it’s worth remembering that Yugoslavia – the Communist Federation of Yugoslavia – was not an ideal state and there was a lot of secret police activity. But, when you came from somewhere like Czechoslovakia or East Germany or, God forbid Romania or Albania, there was a real breath of fresh air when you got to Yugoslavia. You felt as though there was genuine debate, a genuinely spontaneous culture which sometimes aroused the wrath of the party and the leading cultural politicians, but, on the whole, it was a really exciting place to be.
Romania and Bulgaria were regarded in Yugoslavia as rather poor cousins and one thing that the Yugoslavs were offered to comfort themselves with is that they weren’t Romania or Bulgaria. And, so, when you see the process, from the late 1980s to 2007, when Romania and Bulgaria became members of the European Union, it was a big wake-up call to everybody, particularly here in Serbia, to see that it was Romania of all places that joined the European Union.
That gave the former Yugoslavia and the constituent parts of it a chance to reflect on what had gone wrong. And it’s also important to remember that, at the time that Yugoslavia was beginning to feel the strange and stresses of the end of communism and its dissolution into violence, there was a comparable situation in Transylvania. You had a very similar group emerge amongst the Rumanians (Vatra Românească) and you had some very unreasonable nationalist voices coming out of parts of Hungary, and there were violent incidents and people were killed, and people were injured. That process was stopped by a political process that began in Budapest and Bucharest. Basically, the two leaderships, or the élites of the countries, got together and said “actually we don’t want this to happen. Let us implements some things which are going to prevent the inflammation of nationalist passions”.
Here, in the former Yugoslavia, what happened is that the leaderships, first in Serbia, and, then in quick succession in Croatia, decided that that was not a path of them going to go down, but it was a conscious decision. You then saw the beginning of a process whereby the state itself, and heads of state, deemed and projected through the media that it was permissible to take the life of other people, and the spiral began. It began really, I would say in May and June 1991, with the massacres in Croatia and then after that it just went downhill.
Now, I and others tried to counter the narrative that what was happening at the time during the wars was about ancient ethnic hatreds because that simply didn’t stand up to scrutiny: Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, Albanians, Macedonians, Slovenes, have all got on tolerably well in various parts of their history. So, what was really going on here? For me what this was about was the dissolution of a state and its assets were up for grabs. And you saw leaders use the nationalist narrative in order to grab hold of state assets and privatise them. They mobilised organized crime in order to do that, they mobilised corrupt networks, they mobilised the intelligence services.
This is where I want to come to the legacy, which is not exclusive to the former Yugoslavia, but it has made everything much more complicated in the former Yugoslavia than it has been in countries like Romania or Bulgaria. That it that is very easy and very quick for culture of corruption and criminality to put down deep roots in a society. It’s then extremely difficult to pull out those roots and to try and steer a society back towards some form of normality.
This issue which affected the former Soviet Union, and which affected all of the former communist states, is one which none have successfully overcome. But some countries are battling with it more successfully than others. And, really, that for me is the primary legacy and difficulty of these territories, encapsulated in one event, and that was the assassination in March 2003 of Zoran Djindjić.
Zoran Djindjić was to my mind attempting to drag Serbia out of the 20th century into the 21st century in a very short space of time. And the conspiracy which was responsible for his murder where all the usual suspects of those who had made huge sums of money and revelled in the violence of the 1990s. And it’s something that this country and other countries are still struggling to overcome.
S. G. Markovich:
With this legacy of corruption, organised crime, political assassination, we come to the perceptions of the region that the events of the 1990s and of 2003 made about Serbia and the region in Western Europe. These perceptions, do they still operate as a potential hindrance to faster enlargement of the European Union?
Misha Glenny:
Well, another big question. The simple answer is yes. But what one has to remember first of all is that when the wars ended here, by this time diplomats, journalists, the general public, business people, were fed up with those (I’m talking about people from outside the region obviously it was axiomatic but inside the region, everyone was fed up). Outside the region were fed up with the constant flow of bad news out of South-Eastern Europe. Everyone was hugely relieved first when Dayton came along, and then when 1244 brought the Kosovo War to armistice and then to a sort of a conclusion. Interestingly enough, even when things threatened to explode in Macedonia very soon after this, there was not much interest in the media at the time.
So, what happens is that Western interests in particular basically emigrated out of South-Eastern Europe. And September 2001 happened. And everyone’s perception of what was a threat to the world changed, and all of a sudden individual terrorism became the number one problem. Meanwhile the societies here in South-Eastern Europe were stewing the residual juices of war and social collapse, and although there was a certain engagement on the part of the European Union, culminating in 2003 in the Salonica Declaration promising a European Union membership, certainly all media organisations pulled out of the former Yugoslavia and weren’t interested.
There were a huge number of post-conflict problems facing this area, not the least of which was the constitutional ambiguity. Because there were a whole series of constitutional resolutions to the conflict here, varying from territory to territory, based on different principles interestingly enough.
So, there was little attention paid to the real challenges that this region faced after the conflict. It is on the level that I understand because I’m a journalist and journalists tend to follow where the events are happening. There was a huge sigh of relief, and I think that translated itself into real neglect of the region, and we’re still suffering from that at the moment.
On balance it was a good thing that Croatia made it into the European Union just as the doors were closing. Although, I always maintain that for the stability of the region having Serbia and Croatia in the European Union would be a much more optimal solution because it balances the tension in the region. And were Serbia to become a member I think that Bosnia would follow fairly quickly.
S. G. Markovich:
Ivan, you were advisor to two prime ministers of Serbia. You had to deal with these perceptions, but you were also working on promoting transatlantic relations in the region. Did you see these perceptions affecting faster EU enlargement? You talked in the past very much, among the first here, about enlargement fatigue, so is it related?
Ivan Vejvoda:
I’d just like to agree with Misha who’s just made a very important point about the Serbian-Croatian relationship. That is the backbone relationship of this small region historically. That is how Yugoslavia came to being in simplified things, and until that relationship is stable and until Serbia falls into place in the European integration puzzle we won’t have full stability and, Misha is absolutely right then Bosnia will also find its place.
As Misha said, I was very economical because, you know, any of us could spend hours just talking about the 90s and what happened, but I cannot fail to mention that Yugoslavia had this very special place in the Cold War as a model and a hope. I had three conversations with Vaclav Havel, with people like Adam Michnik who is a friend of many of us here, and whenever we start the conversation they would always say “we were hoping that we could become Yugoslavia in Czechoslovakia and in Poland”, because this was a communist regime that was more open than others. No need to explain further than that.
And I mentioned that because I think our advantage became our disadvantage. We were not under the Soviet rule. All countries of Eastern Europe wanted to see the back of the Soviet soldier, and so they had a very simple and clear goal while we turned our advantage into our disadvantage, and as Misha rightly said we were trying to sort ourselves out in the way that he described: communist politicians grabbing nationalism as a tool for power attention to try and stay in power and to seize assets. And nationalism was the easiest tool and digging the bad history of the Second World War, which for example Spain decided not to touch. Spain decided not to touch the civil war because they knew it would explode in their face.
Another thing to mention with regards to the legacy is also the fact that once you open yourself to not being able to resolve your family problem, and you invite external actors, and we remember the “Whites” – UN soldiers coming with their white cars from Argentina and other places. Once you open yourself to that, you are actually asking for something that’s very protracted, because you are unable to solve the problem yourself.
I mention that because the EU that proclaimed famously “the finest hour” and this was “the hour of Europe”, and in terms of America we all remember the visits of Jim Baker and the European leaders at the last minute. But it was too late. Because I think they didn’t expect that Yugoslavia would fall apart. They thought that would happen after Tito’s death in 1980. We lived for a decade, more or less peacefully, with lots of socioeconomic problems, and then it exploded into our face, and we had to live with that.
Since Misha mentioned Zoran Djindjić which of course I think is a very important turning point. This was real hope that Serbia had understood that it had lost a decade, that it was time to catch up, and as we all know he was extremely energetic. He would come into the office every day during the years that I was there saying “we must solve Kosovo issue as quickly as possible because that is impeding the democratic advance of Serbia, and, of course, at the time we must deliver on the Hague tribunal indictments because that is an international requirement, and we had to put the war criminals to jail.” Of course, he didn’t live to go through. And I think we’re still paying the price of that sudden stop to the modernisation process that he had engaged, and I think that opened an avenue of development that slowed us down, and we are still I think recovering from that.
But the perceptions are there, and I think that what happened in Banjska the other day is only a confirmation that we are not, to put it simply, following the path of Romanians and Hungarians that Misha rightly mentioned. I think leaders have to sit down and say “wait a minute we live next to each other. Yes we have differences, but if we are serious about stability and prosperity we must find a way of how we will solve this.”
S. G. Markovich:
You have already both moved to the 21st century, so this is the second part of the panel. In 2000, the whole territory of ex-Yugoslavia got democratically elected governments, and a rather optimistic idea circulated back then about the region. For instance, those who claimed that Serbia would join the EU no earlier than 2010, they were considered very dark pessimists back in 2000. So, what has been achieved in the region in the previous twenty-three years, and what opportunities have been missed, Ivan?
Goodness gracious. Well, Misha has mentioned quite a few things already: the big bang enlargement of 2004 and 2007. He rightly mentioned Romania and Bulgaria which, you know, let’s be honest, we looked down upon those countries that were under Ceausesku and Zhivkov and really people traveling there felt that we were at a higher level of development economically, culturally etc. We were open to the Western world, you know. No need to mention our theatre festival BITEF from the mid-sixties, FEST, the film festival, famous music festival, the exchange, the fact that we had access to Western press etc. All that continued into the 2000s, and then of course because of Dayton and of the bombing by NATO in 1999, Misha mentioned 1244, the UN resolution that ended [the war].
But, as I’ve said many times publicly, Serbia was defeated by NATO and when you are defeated in a war there’s a consequence and the price to that. Ιf you don’t acknowledge that you have been defeated but pretend, you know like when Milosevic famously declared us all heroes when the June 10th agreement in Kumanovo was reached between the British General and our officers of the Yugoslav Army. And the result of that signing was the retreat of the whole Serbian state from the territory of the Province of Kosovo. So, that still lives with us. Here we are 23 years later. We still haven’t solved it.
Yes, there have been things that have been moved and forwarded. We are a candidate country. Yes, for 10 years now, we haven’t, you know, in realistic terms advanced very much, nor has Montenegro, maybe Macedonia. We’re all somewhere at the same level. We are all, and, I think it’s not trivial to say, all these countries want and have not reneged on the promise of wanting to join Europe. Now, how we go about it is a wholly different thing. Are we really sincere about the rule of law? It doesn’t seem so in many cases. Or media freedoms? Because if we want to join Europe it means espousing the values, the universal values of rights of freedoms of association and speech. And we see that there’s a law now [in Serbia] on the media that’s really not quite open as one would want it, to put it gently. We have accomplished things you look at, you know, the way that technology has come in. We have a lot of IT specialists, culture is still vibrant.
But one of the most dramatic things, and we may come back to that, is the really dramatic demographic situation in the whole country. We have spoken previously of a region of the Western Balkans of 18 million people. I think we are around 16 million at best and declining. An aging population and people. You mentioned the year 2010. I was even saying 2007 at the time when I was with Prime Minister Djindjic.
S. G. Markovich:
Papandreou was even saying 2004.
Ivan Vejvoda:
You know we thought we could, and I think we could have caught up with Croatia but will not to go into the details. But, because this has been lasting very long, too long, and that’s why there’s been this fatigue on those sides, that people are deciding very simply to join individually and they’re going to Austria, to America, to Sweden etc. It’s mostly young people. But as I like to say it’s not only our doctors and nurses. It’s also my electrician here in Belgrade who left five years ago, and I asked this stupid question why are you going: “Well I earn seven times more than living here”, he replied.
S. G. Markovich:
In addition to those twenty-three years with opportunities that have been missed, the European Union kept going. It evolved, it was enlarged on three occasions, with 13 new members, one member of course infamously left.
Misha Glenny:
I was going to say it also shrank!
S. G. Markovich:
Indeed, very recently. So, how much has the Union changed in the last two decades and had the Union’s capacities to handle and solve continental problems improved or diminished in addition to these twenty-three years of missed chances?
Misha Glenny:
Well, I think I will mention Brexit here which of course is one of my nationalities. I was very very fortunate that I had a grandfather who, in 1896, had the good sense to be born in Murie County down in Northern Ireland. That event in 1896 enabled me to apply for an Irish passport in 2016 after Brexit went and got in favour of leaving the European Union. So mercifully I am still European. But this was actually quite a big event because at the time there was a surge of populism throughout Europe which had complex roots.
The Brexit vote and what happened after the Brexit vote, as the United Kingdom negotiated its departure from the European Union, made a lot of people in Europe sit up and say “actually I don’t think it’s such a good idea that we should leave the European Union, because it’s a big big kafuffle.” It lasts for seven, eight, nine, ten years, and then your economy drops by six percent according to the Bank of England over a period of time. And so that had an effect of stopping anti-Europeanism within the European Union.
It also for populists in general had an important lesson. And that is: if you want to secure power as a populist force in the European Union or in the United States don’t promise something that you can actually achieve, because the populists of Britain said “we’re going to leave the European Union” and they did it, and they then are responsible for all the mess that comes afterwards. Whereas if you are really smart populists, you are always promising something for the future which can never be realised.
The European Union changed, and it was a significant change in terms of the Balkans as well because the United Kingdom had always been a big supporter of the expansion of the European Union into South-Eastern Europe. And one of the reasons I deeply regret the Brexit referendum is that it actually damaged the prospect of EU expansion into the Western Balkans.
We are in a situation now, and I am unfortunately anticipating one of your next questions here, but I think it is important to say that in 2023 the impact of the tectonic place shifting in geopolitics are now really beginning to be felt around the world, not just in Europe, although it is very important in Europe. In the past month we had the incident in Banjska, we had the growing realisation that the Ukrainians’ counter-offensive has pretty much failed. We have had the cleansing of 120,000 souls from Artsakh – Nagorno Karabakh into Armenia which was on the news headlines for about five minutes and disappeared. Who is engaged with that problem now? And then of course recently we’ve had Israel and Gaza.
Now these are huge problems to the background of growing competition between the United States and China, and Europe trying to decide where it stands in that conflict. And it has only been a month, but when you look back at Banjska and you think actually compared to everything else that’s going on: A. this was a kind of sort of fast-cool, almost comic event if it weren’t for the fact that four people died, but secondly you look at the Serbia-Kosovo issue and compared to Ukraine, compared to what’s going on in the Middle East at the moment, this is a problem which is soluble, this is a problem which we can solve. And if I now were in the higher echelons of the foreign policy making of Brussels, “as a proud Irish citizen”, I would be saying “look, let’s just put a big effort into getting Belgrade and Pristina to compromise over this”, because then we can say to the world: “yes we are competent, we are able to assist people in bridging their differences.” With a problem which for many many years people considered to be utterly insoluble. With the shift in geopolitics around the world, let’s turn what looks like a crisis into an opportunity.
S. G. Markovich:
You have just given a very good idea to someone here to implement your approach to populism, so I hope that no one will use it because we already have had experience with that!
Ivan, what is your opinion, have Union’s capacities to handle and solve continental problems improved or diminished?
Ivan Vejvoda:
I think it’s somewhere in between. One must mention that with the end of the wars, at the end of the bombing [in 1999], that there was a feeling in the European Union that things had gone quiet here, and that a kind of slow process of integration, democratic transition, as we called it then, would be engaged. There were of course the Central European countries that were really rushing to join. The model countries were Poland and Hungary. We can come back to that what happened to them. There was a sense that things were advancing. And then, at the end of the 2000s, we hit the financial crisis, then we hit the migration crisis, then we had Russia’s invasion of Georgia, first in 2008, then in 2014 invasion de facto of Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea. And the EU had its hands full. And they knew, and I have maintained that there won’t be war here, there will be horrible incidents like we had in Banjska, or the May’s kerfuffle between KFOR troops and Serbian thugs who were there doing it.
But, we did war in the 90s. That’s the horrible thing, and all these societies are completely exhausted by that. There’s no force. You know you can rattle weapons etc. There was a famous poll asking, you know: “were Serbia to go to war with Kosovo would you go?” That was one of the strongest results. It said 80% of people did not want to go to war, and of those who wanted to go to war they were mainly about 50 years of age, and not the young people. So, this was a poll I don’t know five or six years ago, some of our colleagues I’m sure know about it. So, I think there’s no willingness to that, but the problem is that the rhetoric in the region of our leaders has not calmed down. And when you look at the tabloid press, for example, in our country, you know after all the calming words on interviews at CNN, like recently, you have the tabloids were fighting a war with everyone in the world.
But let me take you back, you asked me about transatlantic relations. I think it is important to mention here because it is a key component of what is happening. One is that of the six Western Balkan countries three are already full members of NATO. It’s Albania, it’s North Macedonia, and it’s Montenegro. On the positive side, and you know, I completely agree with Misha, what people should look at that in the hierarchy of world conflicts this one in comparison is, I would say, relatively simple without neglecting the difficulty. You look at Northern Ireland. Still not solved, so between two democratic countries Ireland and the UK. It’s difficult, so it’s even more difficult here. But having said that I think that, and here we need to mention the Russian invasion, a nuclear power invading a sovereign European country of 41 million people – Ukraine. This was for me, in my world, this was a second 1989 in terms of what Micha rightly calls tectonic shift. This was a huge tectonic shift equal to 1989, and if you did not understand that this was a tectonic shift, and that you had to react on that night or that morning and realign yourself, then you were not really working in the self interest of the state and society.
What do I mean by that? It means that Europe woke up to two facts. One is that European security defence is impossible without the United States. Europe does not have the military capacity to defend itself were it to come to an invasion. And secondly the energy dependence on Russian gas and Russian oil. That was the sort of the huge wake up call on that morning, and most European countries have shifted away from Russian gas. There are some exceptions as we know. In the country of Austria, where both Misha and I are working now, have imported more Russian gas than others, but they have all introduced sanctions.
My question, as a naive question, is why is our country Serbia the only country in Europe that did not introduce some kind of sanctions? The Russians would not feel it. We are such a tiny country. Our relations in terms of trade are nothing. But what we have said is that we are not really aligning ourselves with the path that we want to follow: direction Europe, right.
The Americans are there to stay. This will not change. I fully support the idea of strategic autonomy that Europe has been talking about and President Macron especially, but we have a long way to go. So, to your question is Europe capable? Yes, it is if it understands the geopolitical, geo-strategic, and geo-economic importance of coming here. Europe understood that even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. You remember Von der Layen coming here and giving money for the Belgrade-Nish railway, not to mention other things. And she announced it in Tirana just three days ago the growth package of about seven billion, in the next five-six years. Europe is awakened.
But we must understand that maybe we’ll get to it or not to the complexity of this enlargement, because now, however strange it may seem, the Western Balkans are being pulled by Ukraine and Moldova because of the invasion of Russia. Europe understands that its security begins at the Russian-Ukrainian border, and it cannot leave us, the six who are candidate countries for so many years. It must pull us along, but you know as in the famous joke if you don’t buy the lottery ticket [you then cannot get the award], which means if we don’t start reforming and introducing more the rule of law, we won’t feel the pulling effect of the European Union, and some are already saying do we want another Hungary or Poland until a few days ago. But, fortunately in Poland they found it in themselves to elect a democratic pro-European coalition.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=y-CQbed04qc%3Fab_channel%3DNMNovimagazin
S. G. Markovich:
Ivan, you have just mentioned America, and looking globally you have both been involved with many global issues. Misha Glenny has covered in his books the global criminal world, dark market, Brazilian favelas in his last book. You have both been directly involved in analysing and promoting transatlantic relations.
In your experience what is your assessment? Has the world become a safer or a much more complex place in the last two decades?
Misha Glenny:
I don’t think it’s a safer place. It’s definitely more complex, but there are positive signs as well. I think, for example, after the experience of Trump, Biden has fashioned his presidency very carefully, and, in economic terms, he has done extremely well in the United States to the extent that it is possible that he may end up being recognised as a transformative president. He passed some extraordinary legislation, and it’s amazing that he got it through at the end of August 2022, which is the Inflation Reduction Act. And this has really set the United States on the path to effecting a green transition, but also reorganising its industrial base in a way that was sorely needed.
Interestingly enough Trump talked about a lot of this, about investing in infrastructure and so on, but he did very little about it. Biden has actually not only talked about it, but worked as well. Now is this going to be enough in a deeply polarised world, with a lot of uncertainty, to secure a second term for Biden’s presidency? Not necessarily is the answer to that, if only because Biden is now getting older and he’s occasionally visibly quite old. He is determined to stand, as I understand it, as a president next year, and he will almost certainly be facing Donald Trump. There is an old saying in the United Kingdom, attributed wrongly to Harold Wilson, that the week is a long time in politics. A year is like a century in American politics. So, we don’t know what the situation will be next year, but there is no doubt that there is concern across Europe and in Canada that Trump will win the next election.
There is no doubt that Vladimir Putin’s primary strategy in Ukraine is holding out until the American election. The United States is having an oversized influence of domestic politics which is looking particularly dysfunctional at the moment including within the Republican Party in Congress itself. It’s been a breakdown in governments in the United States, and so a lot of people are looking anxiously at what will happen.
Personally, I think there have been some positive developments as well. I think Lula’s victory over Bolsonaro in Brazil is a very positive thing as measured by the dramatic decrease in the deforestation of the Amazon since Lula returned to power.
It’s important that we focus on these positive and good things because the real challenges that we face such as climate change, such as the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the breakdown in the system of nuclear weapon treaties that have been seen fragmenting over the past decade, and also the enormous challenge posed by artificial intelligence and quantum computing a little further down the line. We have to have planetary co-operation for these issues, and so we really require the United States, China, India, the European Union, Brazil, Indonesia, and other major states whose acts have a disproportionate impact on the rest of the world. We really need them to find creative ways of co-operating on a diplomatic, political, economic, and social level.
Ivan Vejvoda:
I’ll start by quoting our friend and colleague, friend of many of us here, Ivan Krastev, who is a colleague of ours at the Institute in Vienna who had a programme, he still has a programme, and he decided to rename the programme “a world in pieces”. He quoted Clifford Geertz, the famous anthropologist, who actually gave a lecture under that title at the Institute for Human Sciences in 1995, when he said, “actually it’s not all going in the right direction”. He said “there would be an obsession with identity and difference”, and that’s why he talked about the world in pieces. So yes, in a sense the world is in pieces, it’s the complexity word that you mentioned.
I think that in terms of Europe and Eurasian continent, the Russian invasion completely upended the European security architecture that we more-or-less successfully had been living in since 1975 and the Helsinki Accord. Misha is right to mention the whole nuclear proliferation and lack of control of it. You look at the UN and the Security Council, and you look at the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe based in Vienna. These are basically using the moribund word, they are ineffective, they cannot do anything at the moment because Russia is the invading country, and nobody wants to speak with it in any real terms.
So, the question is what is the future of Russia? How does Russia come back in? How is it that Russia is not allowed to win a war like this, because if it wins then it’s on the border of the rest of us? But the big question along, and I don’t want to repeat what Misha said about climate change. You know, people when they discuss it they say, you know, well the planet will go. No, the planet will survive without us very well. It is we who will suffer. The planet has been turning around for millions of years, so it will keep turning around in different circumstances. So, it’s about whether we want to survive on this planet, and Misha is absolutely right, it requires full planetary co-operation, and we see the difficulty in domestic politics. For example, you look at the German coalition where the Liberal Party has asked to stop gas heating and what kind of backlash that is. And that’s why we have the rise of the far right and not needing to go into it.
But, one needs to mention Trump once again. This was really again a wake-up war. Is the world going to go to pieces fully with Trump wanting to retreat from Europe? We really have to consider and think seriously about the worst-case scenario if Trump wins. My personal prediction is that he won’t, and I put some bets on it, but you know we’ll see next year whether that is right. It doesn’t mean a Republican won’t win, but I don’t think Trump will win. But that’s little me thinking out loud about the future. But that then poses again the question of Europe and the European Union and the way that Europe will carve out its place. Europe is a huge economic actor, a juggernaut, because it’s the biggest economy along with the American and the Chinese, but it is a bit of a dwarf in geopolitical terms, and it was strange that Josep Borrell in the meeting summit with the Chinese said “please treat us like a big power”. The mere fact of saying that tells you that he knows that we’re not in those. So, the question for Europe is how do we carve out that place with the big players?
We are a big player and that then poses a question for us for this tiny region of 16 million people and for our country. It doesn’t mean that you don’t sense the dignity of your country by recognising the reality of its position in the world and in Europe. So, I think the goal must be to really join this bigger family. You cannot survive isolated.
Yes, you can like Albania in the 60s being linked to China when Yugoslavia was really a rich country, and everybody was looking at it, as I said. So, we really must put our finger to our head and say what is this about, and actually being able to do something. I will finish with the positive example that we mentioned. It is Macedonia. Two leaders in Greece and in Macedonia, Tsipras and Zaev, found it in themselves to say this must stop. Greece blocked Macedonia for 27 years and Tsipras went against his public opinion. Leaders always say “but the public does not want it”. If you are a statesman you can do these things, and Zaev did the same thing and they reached the Prespa Agreement. The way Europe reacted to that is a whole other story. But I think there are good stories here to be told.
Misha Glenny:
There are two things that I would like to mention coming out of that. One is that I was, as one does, wondering in the Dolomites this summer, and I spoke to quite a lot of German speaking South Tyrolese. And when I was living in Austria in the 1980s that issue was still quite a tense issue. Not as much as it had been in the 1970s when you had bombings, you had a terrorist organisation, and you had an Italian political party, the NSN using South Tyrol as a way of recruiting fascists to their ranks, and also an attempt to socially engineer the place by moving Italian speakers into the German speaking areas. And Italy and Austria sat down and came up with something called “Paket”.
When I spoke to South Tyrolians in the summer, they said that there were absolutely no tensions any more over questions of language, over access to work, over schooling. This was the place where South Tirolians were happy as Italian citizens with the right to be Austrian citizens as well, and happy with their language rights. You can solve these problems. The Belfast agreement, the Good Friday Agreement of 1997. It’s standing what’s happened since Brexit, it is another good example.
I would like to issue a word of warning to the European Union. The European Union made a huge mistake. It made a big failure during the pandemic by blocking the distribution of vaccines to the Global South and demanding money for it. It looked like, and it was a really cynical move, and the payback for that came when Russia invaded Ukraine, and there was very little support in the Global South for the European position on Ukraine, and that was partly determined by what happened in the pandemic.
The European Union really has to realise that it has responsibilities beyond those of its own citizens because it’s so wealthy, relative to other parts of the world. The pandemic that we experienced between 2020 and 2022 is not yet over. As we know COVID is coming back, but also because of the way the pandemics emerge, the zoonotic diseases, this is unlikely to be the last pandemic that we’re going to see in our lifetimes. It’s another planetary challenge where we have to co-operate, and Europe will have to prove itself to be more generous than it has been in the two.
S. G. Markovich:
You have already moved to the third part and last part because of the present-day situation and you already decided to bet.
So, just a short reply to this question. You both have been very much involved with many EU regional projects and policies. How realistic is it to expect that the region and Ukraine, and you already mentioned something about it, could join the EU in the foreseeable future, and we don’t mean by the end of this century, but like in the next 10 years. You already made bet about 2007, so what’s your bet now?
Ivan Vejvoda:
I’m not giving any more dates. I’ve learned my lesson. I think, to put it very simply, the sooner the better, but that is an all to simple answer because issues are very complex. And in a few sentences: Ukraine and Moldova will get a date in December to begin accession talks, but we know that’s only the very far beginning. Turkey has been negotiating for ages.
I think there’s the security geopolitical aspect, as I said, because a lot of this is about security of Europe. A lot of it is driven by that. And I think we here must understand that we are being asked to contribute to the security of Europe by resolving this issue [the Kosovo issue] because if you have a festering situation, Europe then has to devote energy and attention to you whereas there are these much bigger things that we should mention: the Middle East, Ukraine and Russia.
So, I think that the issue for Europe is really to invest as best they can, while awaiting for a positive dynamic in our societies and in our leaderships, because politics is very much top down and I have written recently a small piece advocating that we need a quick win. And, I called it the two Ms: Montenegro and Moldova. Take in two small countries in the next five years up until 2030. Of course, they need to do their homework: the rule of law. There’s a Franco-German paper that came out about what the EU needs to do to prepare itself for new candidates by 2030. I recommend it to all of you.
There are lot of interesting things of what the EU needs to reform, but also it’s a message. The key message there is that without the rule of law nobody moves closer. But as we all know, and I think many people have been involved here, we need to feel that the European Union is taking us to the table, bringing us to the table on security, on climate, on critical war materials or a lot of issues and it already are.
We are a part of the Energy Union, the Transport Union, but there needs to be a tangible feeling for the people as well. So, it’s a pas de deux, it’s a tango where two need to play and if we don’t feel and I always say the homework 90% of it is here, but the little help from our friends in Europe is essential without that it doesn’t happen. So, in my wildest positive dreams, we would see Montenegro, Moldova or maybe Albania, we’ll see how things go there, at least close to the door by 2030.
S. G. Markovich:
Belgrade was originally a Celtic settlement, so to make a joke, we could also apply for Irish citizenship maybe while awaiting our membership.
Misha Glenny:
Actually Ireland is an extraordinary example of what the European Union can do to a country because when it joined the European Union it was still more or less a theocracy where the Catholic Church determined so much of social policy in particular, and it was also quite a corrupt country as well. And since becoming a member of the European Union, Ireland has become one of the greatest success stories such is that the average wage in Ireland is now significantly higher than it is in the United Kingdom.
You can see we have real success stories. I have to say that with the prospect of Ukraine joining the European Union all things have changed as well, and succession talks may be marked in December. Bringing Ukraine into the European Union is a whole different ballgame from bringing in the Western Balkans. As we saw with the reaction by Poland, initially Ukraine’s greatest supporter, to the imported Ukrainian grain into Poland and other European Union countries. Ukraine will have probably the largest army in the European Union, a battle-harmed army at that. It will be traumatized at the end of the war on a whole series of levels. It is, as we know, a country which suffers from considerable corruption. And, so, whilst I think that Ukraine is very much in the forefront of the European Union’s geo-strategic and geo-economic thinking, it has a lot of critical raw materials that the EU would like to get its hands on. It is going to be an enormous challenge.
If you were to see the EU neglect the Western Balkans in favour of Ukraine, you would have a serious crisis here in South-Eastern Europe on your hand in my opinion. So, whether it will happen or not I don’t know, but my advice to the EU is to double down on your efforts in the Western Balkans before you try and bite off the huge issue of Ukraine and try and swallow that one.
Ivan Vejvoda:
May I just add two sentences. The data point is very important, the estimated population of Ukraine now is 31 million. The Western Balkans are half of 31 million if my estimation of 16 million is right. So very important to understand the figures on that. And, second, I think the fact that Ukraine has taken such a cardinal role, of course now it is not so much in the news because Israel-Palestine is, that we are in the same boat and Misha is absolutely right, these things come together.
This begs the question about the Western Balkans, the question that many of us have asked over the years. What is the cost of non-enlargement? What does it mean to have the Western Balkans outside of Europe? In my simple view it means a playground for Russia and for China economically and Russia is here to be as spoiler to show that the European Union is weak and cannot bring these countries into the democratic European fold.
Misha Glenny:
Yeah, one might argue that they have a point.
S. G. Markovich:
Now we come to the next to the last question, to something that your Institute has been very much discussing. There is an increasing number of organisations and researchers who are deeply concerned about the prospects of the international liberal order and the future of liberal democracy globally, like Freedom House, V-Dem Institute etc. To what extent are they both in danger: international liberal order and democracy?
Serbia is also among the countries where democracy has suffered setbacks. It is now considered a hybrid or transitional country in terms of democracy, so neither democracy nor autocracy, but somewhere in between.
In your opinion, is liberal democracy going to be reduced to Western Europe, the Anglosphere and its allies or is it still going to play a global role?
Misha Glenny:
I think it will still play a global role. I think that it is under threat in Western Europe as much as it is anywhere else. When I saw that the AFD (die Alternative für Deutschland), got 18% of the vote in Hessen, a land, a province where I actually as a 16-year old went to school, and I looked up the little town Korbach, where I was at school and there they had almost 23%. It is just astonishing to see that the AFD is now conquering parts of the Western half of Germany as well as the Eastern half of Germany, and this is a threat which we have to take very seriously in my opinion.
So Western Europe is as vulnerable as other places, but you know, notwithstanding Bolsonaro, notwithstanding the bloodshed in Colombia, there are countries in Latin America which really take their democracy very seriously and are very proud of it. It is harder to find parts of Africa. Kenya has struggled through some difficult times and has become a big centre of economic growth in East Africa. In South Africa, I am afraid to say, the prospects are not greater at the moment. India remains a vibrant democracy, but one which is clearly subject to the populist troops as well. So, it is hard to say.
What I would say is that whether you are in Europe, whether you are in India, whether you are in South Africa or Brazil, you have to fight for the liberal democracy. We have to stand up and fight for this system if we want to maintain our own autonomy, our own freedom to think, to associate, to express those thoughts. And you know, there is no question that challenges are much larger than they were. Social media has changed the dynamics of democracy fundamentally, and one of the reasons why I think all of these institutes, who are thinking about the international liberal order or the very question of democracy, are important is that democracy needs to adapt. The democracy that we have, at the moment, clearly has major vulnerabilities, and we need to think more creatively about how democracy will engage citizens and get citizens involved in the political process. Because, at the moment, you see a lot of alienation from that process.
S. G. Markovich:
Ivan, the same question. And, in addition to it, you were working so much with America, America was a model of democracy. Now in certain rankings it’s called “a flawed democracy”. So, what has happened?
Ivan Vejvoda:
Nobody is perfect. And its no wonder Misha and I have been transversed so long because we believe in the same things. Democracy is the struggle, all the democratic benefits that we have through history from the French Revolution, or the English Revolution, or other revolutions have been won in the streets and sometimes through institutions. People have died to get the right to vote, or to get the right to have an eight-hour work day, to have children not working.
People forget that this is not given on a silver plate, that it has to be reinvented every morning when you wake up. Because there are always those who will try to take it away, who will try to concentrate power in their own hands. That is why we humanity have invented through the English and French political philosophers something called the checks and balances, pluralism, the separation of powers between the legislative, the judicial, and the executive. How do we control the president, who we elect directly? That’s why we have parliaments and that’s why we should have an independent judiciary that unfortunately in this country we don’t have, as we know. So, we have to fight for that, and I think Misha gave a very good tableau of where the world is.
And, so, it’s a constant challenge because those in power using populist nationalist means will do that. But if I take the negative examples of Hungary and Poland, not anymore, the negative example, both capital cities were in the hands of the democratic opposition. Budapest is in the hands of the opposition and of course Warsaw was in the hands of Rafał Trzaskowski, who we know very well, and in Turkey Istanbul and Ankara are in the hands of the opposition.
So, I think people tend to forget, we talk about Erdogan, Orban, Kaczinski, but things are a little more complex and these facts I think show that the struggle never ends as we cannot be complacent about when we have it, and as you said America is the best example of how things can go very badly wrong in what we call an old democracy.
S. G. Markovich:
Unfortunately, Serbia is an example where it does not work, neither in the capital nor in the province.
Ivan Vejvoda:
There will be elections.
S. G. Markovich:
Speaking of that we now come to the final point of the panel. Do you have any messages or recommendations that you would like to share with all those in the region who believe that the EU prospects and harmonisation of the region with the liberal order are possible, and I suppose most of those who are in this hall still believe it?
Misha Glenny:
Well, I would say the only thing I could say, whatever I say will sound trite and fatuous, please forgive me in advance for that. But I would say don’t give up but it’s up to every individual in Serbian, Bosnian, Kosovo, Macedonian, Albanian, Montenegrin society to stand up and do what they can and let the European Union know that it is still a goal which the region aspires to. But as I say, 20 years after 2003, it can’t help but sound somewhat trite, so forgive me.
Ivan Vejvoda:
Yes, it has been 20 years since the Thessaloniki Summit, and I remember being there in Thessaloniki as a part of a civic meeting that happened. Huge hopes, and our friend George Papandreou was in the lead and the famous words of Romano Prodi who was then president who said “yes these countries will join without ifs and buts” provided of course they fulfil.
I fully understand our friends who are very pro-European and who are losing faith and who say Europe doesn’t want us. What are they doing? Supporting these various regimes in the region? Why aren’t they speaking up more forcefully? I fully understand that, but as Misha rightly said, if you believe in these values, if you believe in the possibility of a better, more just, more democratic society where human rights and the rule of law are possible, as you were saying earlier, this means that you have to fight for it, you have to go out there and be active in our various ways you know. It does not mean you have to be active in a political party, you can be civically active or in your neighbourhood or in your family, or you know in the shop when you go and you hear something you know you say. Well maybe not easy, nothing easy about this.
So, we must not be naive about the fact how difficult it will be, but again if we believe in this, and that’s the whole European project, this is a peace project. My Goodness, you know, we had a war and if we are serious about peace and stability at least where we are, then this is the project we want to join. European member states have not gone to war with each other. Huge problems are there. There is constant talk about the Franco-German friction and tension, and we now see that yesterday Germans gave in on the French need to have nuclear power as part of the mix in the climate change. Compromise is the key to everything, and if we do not understand that we won’t move forward.
S. G. Markovich
Thank you both very much and we hope that for the 40th anniversary of the Belgrade Open School we will be able to host you as EU members. Otherwise, Ivan, we may follow your electrician, I am afraid.