Serbia should not enter the European Union, it should be unbiased and trade with everyone in order to quickly develop and get richer. This is a rough concept of neutrality which the Democratic Party of Serbia of former Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica strongly began to advocate, putting it against the idea of EU membership as a historical goal. Everything is accompanied by claims about billions of euros of Russian loans which are supposed to rescue Serbia from the “European embrace.”
The idea of neutrality serves as another name for getting closer to Russia which did not bomb us, which is not “taking Kosovo” away from us, and which supports us in the United Nations. Political parties and political groups that support European integration are automatically classified among those who support Kosovo’s independence and humiliate Serbia. So once again it became clear that foreign policy strategy, which is normally patterned for the coming decades and even centuries, in Serbia is the subject of daily political outsmarting.
The idea of neutrality is veiled by the spirit of block divisions. It is an expression of sorrow for the time in which the former Yugoslavia built a position between two large blocks, managing to pull out the political and economic benefits from it. But, there are no more blocks or the former Yugoslavia, so neutrality has neither meaning, nor significance as before. In fact, the main objective of the DSS is to prevent the entry of Serbia into EU and NATO, and everything else is just the accompanying rhetoric.
There was no serious dialogue in Serbian society on the subject of foreign policy strategy prior to these elections, but it should not be surprising at all. This has been the practice for the last 200 years, or since the beginning of the formation of modern Serbian state. Only in the past 25 years we lived in four states with different names and significantly different sizes, and main parties did not even think to openly face the reality and try to define achievable short, medium and long-term goals.
First we stuck to the phrase that all Serbs should live in one state, so we lost two wars. Then we thought that Montenegro and Serbia would remain inseparable, with Kosovo as an integral part of Serbia, so we lost another war. To be honest, in this war we also lost Kosovo, or at least its biggest part, and just few years later Montenegro chose the independence. The justification is easy to find – we have powerful enemies and avoid relying on powerful friends who would help us, only if we sincerely asked for it.
When everything adds up, Serbia has dramatically deteriorated, failing to firmly define a clear policy based on reality after the regime of Slobodan Milosevic was overthrown. Instead, the new political elite carefully sought to show to voters that it would not give up on its “historical goals.” Today, this is policy is not only being carried out by DSS and SRS, but also by the parties committed to the European future, promising “both Kosovo and the EU”, trade with the South and the North and the East and the West, prosperity and success on all fronts.
However, DSS has transformed its slogan of neutrality into a political concept. We should be like Switzerland or Norway, even though we don’t have the banks filled with the money of the richest people in the world or large oil reserves. The only thing we can truly offer is a “naked” geographical position which, in itself, is not sufficient.
The economist Vladimir Gligorov and the board member of the Belgrade Center for Security Policy Filip Ejdus talk and write about the economic and security aspects of the idea of neutrality for the Portal of Novi Magazin.