Serbia looks set for weeks of debilitating coalition-building after the results of parliamentary elections on 21 January. Although Tomislav Nikolić‘s ultra-nationalist Serbian Radical Party won the most votes, under the proportional representation system no party won an outright victory. Many Western diplomats and politicians have tried to depict the election as a decisive confrontation between the dark forces of Balkan primitivism and ‘pro-European’ enlightenment. The reality in Serbia itself was more prosaic, with much of the election being fought around economic questions and technocratic promises of fighting corruption.
These elections were the first since the dissolution of the Union of Serbia-Montenegro in May 2006, itself cobbled together under the auspices of European Union (EU) foreign policy chief Javier Solana in 2003. One of the key issues in the election was the status of the province of Kosovo, still formally part of Serbia but in practice run as a United Nations (UN) protectorate, complete with an internationally-appointed viceroy, since 1999. Although the Serbian constitution of October 2006 declares Kosovo an integral part of Serbia, the UN is expected shortly to publish a report that would redraw Serbia’s borders by advocating some form of semi-sovereign independence for the Albanian-majority province.
It was in 1999 that NATO launched what many still consider to be a ‘good war’ over Kosovo. NATO leaders America and Britain claimed to be intervening to liberate Kosovo from Serb domination. The continuing wrangling over territory in the region, and the West’s ongoing role in shaping politics there, suggests that this ‘good war’ did little to herald a new era of freedom and democracy.
With the parliamentary elections in Serbia, Western powers were hoping to cajole the Serbian electorate into voting for parties that would help the West avoid the unseemly sight of having to dismember Serbia themselves. They would prefer that a Serbian government renounce the province of Kosovo and conceded to a further carving up of the region. This explains why so many international worthies, foreign ministers ‘from Scandinavia to Slovenia’, patronised Belgrade the week before the election, talking about how Serbs should vote ‘for the future and not the past’ – ‘the future’ in this case being pro-Western parties, principally Serbian president Boris Tadić’s Democratic Party (1).
But it is hardly surprising that many Serbs have ended up spurning the instructions issued by Western diplomats and embassies. This most recent round of Western intervention is only the latest attempt in the six years since the overthrow of Milošević in October 2000 to pressure Serbian citizens into doing what the EU and the UN want. The promises of ‘European integration’ sound more hollow each time (2).