How real are the prospects of the NATO expansion in the Balkans where memories of deadly US-led air strikes are still vivid? And is there a reason to believe that Ukraine is yet another country where NATO plans to expand? Radio VR is discussing it with Dr.Cedomir Antic (Serbia) and Dr. John Laughland (UK).
Serbia and its army will remain neutral in military terms, though the Individual Partnership Action Plan (IPAP) will be signed as part of the Partnership for Peace between Serbia and NATO.
That’s what Serbian Defence Minister Bratislav Gasic said on Tuesday. He also underlined that the Ministry of Defence and the Serbian Armed Forces have friends both in the east and the west.
Says Dr. Cedomir Antic, senior researcher at the Institute for Balkan Studies in Belgrade:
“We here are traditionally very bound to Russia. I'm sure that in the course of seven years Serbia would not be part of NATO, despite the fact that the majority of our people are aware that Russia is not present in the Balkans and is not ready to protect us. The similar issue is in Bosnia where the Republika Srpska (the sovereign entity which comprises 49% of the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and is a constituent part of Bosnia and Herzegovina) is capable of blocking any approaching to NATO, while the Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats, they would like to join NATO, as Croatia had already did.
I think Montenegro was one of the gravest mistakes of the Russian Federation. As a matter of fact, after the proclamation of Montenegrin independence in 2006, which was parallel with a complete marginalization and oppression towards the ethnic Serbs in Montenegro, who lost their right for the language (like the Russians in the eastern Ukraine after the victory of the so-called EuroMaidan); Russia was one of the biggest investors in Montenegro. However, the Montenegrin Government was openly pro-NATO. It was openly pro-American and it is now much more anti-Serbian, than it was during the Milosevic regime, especially during the wars, and than it was during the first years of economic and political reforms in Serbia after 2000.
… I would say that in Serbia it is virtually impossible that our population would vote in favour of NATO in a referendum. However, the political elites are very much corrupted and they are already won over in favour of NATO.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, I think, it is impossible, as long as the Republika Srpska exists, that this country could become a part of NATO. And this is part of all those efforts and endeavors on the side of Brussels to abolish the Republika Srpska, to limit its autonomy. Republika Srpska is the only political entity in modern Europe whose autonomy is under pressure. And it is under the pressure to be limited, which is paradoxical, on the side of the great democratic powers, like France, Great Britain and the US.
If Russia remains inactive, especially if it starts to be passive, as it had been before 2005, I think that in the long period of time our self-imposed neutrality would be unbearable, because we are the very poor countries, we are without the support from abroad, we are alone here. You should note that the only countries which are not in NATO, are the countries in which the Serbs are an ethnic majority – Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro.
Communists and the communist totalitarian regime created new nations, like Montenegrins and partially Muslim nowadays Bosnians. And the Serbs were not only the majority in Montenegro and a relative majority in Bosnia, but they had to fight for their equality and basic national rights in a war. And in Montenegro we actually lost everything, because our Milosevic Government and later on the Democratic Government, neglected the rights of the Serbian people in Montenegro in order to preserve the Yugoslav federation….
…I would say that Russia should, according to my opinion, in a certain degree change its policy here. I'm aware that Russia is not capable of being present in the Balkans, as it was during the 19th century and the early 20th century. However, if Russia is one of the great powers of the modern world, it should by all means, for example, try to develop its own soft power in Serbia and the Balkans.
I believe that finally the Russian Federation is in the process of changing. In the past, the Russian governments neglected the interests of 30 million ethnic Russians, which were handed over to young nationalisms of newly created independent countries which seceded from the Soviet Union. Now, at least in Ukraine the Russian Federation is taking care of those people. Maybe, it is time for the Russian Federation to take care of its friends, relatives, brothers in the Balkans in a modern way, not in an old-fashioned way”….
Strangely enough, there is a number of similarities between the Balkans of 1990-s and the current Ukraine crisis. Says Dr. John Laughland, the Director of Studies at the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation, based in Paris:
“The crisis in Ukraine, like the crisis in Yugoslavia, was triggered by a desire on the part of some people in Ukraine for European integration and for integration with the West.
In 1991 the breakup of Yugoslavia was triggered when Slovenia and Croatia wanted to leave Yugoslavia in order to join the EU. There were slogans in the streets of Ljubljana in the middle of 1991, slogans which said “Europe now!” And so, Europe exerted a gravitational pull on those republics, which, as everyone remembers, seceded from Yugoslavia. And that was what caused the war.
The other similarity is that, at the same time, as Europe and the West was exerting this gravitational pull, the West was also demonizing, as it were, the eastern orientation of Serbia, just as the former President Yanukovych of Ukraine was himself demonized for, apparently, seeking an orientation with Russia. So, those are the parallels, basically.
The other, I suppose, third parallel is with the Bosnian civil war, which in my view was made longer and more protracted by the fact that the Western powers insisted on keeping Bosnia intact, on keeping it a single country. It was a completely illogical position for them to hold, because the Western powers had supported the breakup of Yugoslavia. But then, they decided that Bosnia should not breakup and they were determined to keep Bosnia as a unitary state, as a single state.
In my view, if Bosnia had been allowed to collapse, as was natural, then the fighting could have been over in, say, six months. In about the same time as the fighting lasted between Serbia and Croatia. Maybe, there might not have even been fighting at all. But the determination was to keep Bosnia a unitary state.
And so, we can see there as well, I think, a parallel with Ukraine, because, again, while the West supported the collapse of the Soviet Union and was very happy when the Soviet Union was dissolved more than 20 years ago now, it is determined, although it is failing, but it is determined to keep Ukraine as a sovereign state. It doesn’t recognize the separation of Crimea, the fact that Crimea has seceded from Ukraine. And, of course, it certainly doesn’t recognize the attempted secession of the eastern Donbas region. So, those are the parallels I see.
But since there are the parallels and since the tactics seem pretty much similar, does that imply that there is a certain common strategy, too?
Dr. John Laughland: Yes, I think the common strategy consists in the fact that the West…and I use the term “West” to mean the EU and the USA, and the American allies elsewhere in the world. But I'm talking particularly about the Transatlantic community, if we can call it but NATO, NATO basically.
The West does have the same strategy. In 1991 it wanted to recreate a new geopolitical center on the European continent. It wanted to make itself the geopolitical center – the EU wanted that. It knew that the Soviet Union was being dissolved, it knew that the Warsaw Pact had been dissolved and it wanted to substitute itself for those old Soviet structures, which it regarded as sources of stability, however much it disliked their ideology.
And it wanted to do this by creating the single currency and taking a substantial step towards a federal political union in Europe. That project, in my view, required an enemy, because the new Western orientation of the central and the eastern European countries, which was on the agenda even in 1991…of course, they didn’t join the EU until much later, but the project of creating a single currency and of federalizing the EU, centralizing it, it was intended, as I say, to attract the former countries of the Warsaw Pact. And in order to do that, of course, anything eastern, anything that was perceived as being socialist or friendly to Russia had to be demonized.
Now we see the same logic in operation, more than 20 years later, because the EU and the Americans are preparing to sing the free trade pact. And that will create a single economic space across the Atlantic, just as we already have a single military space with NATO. But this will be – if you like – the economic counterpart to the existing military structure, which unites the two sides of the Atlantic.
And it is quite a big step forward. Well, maybe, it is a big step backward, but it is a big step – this creation of a single trade zone. And although I don’t think it will be politically very controversial, because it is rather technical, I think, for most voters; nonetheless, constitutionally and geopolitically it is very important. And in order to create this economic zone, which in due course, I'm sure, will become a political zone… and to some extent it already is, because we see that in foreign policy the NATO states act as one. In order to support the creation of this new economic and political entity (which, as I say, is the complement to the existing military entity), just as in 1991 there needs to be an external enemy, an enemy which is both — a geopolitical enemy and also an ideological enemy.
The project in the West is to create a post-national, post-historical and certainly post-Christian, in the case of Europe, political space. And Russia, which is regarded as an authoritarian and illiberal, and nationalistic, and intolerant country is put forward as the ideological, as well as the geopolitical enemy of the West in this new project.
History has it that all those gigantic entities are vulnerable, they’re so big, they tend to often fall apart. Now, free trade zone negotiations sometimes give an impression that the US is trying to, perhaps, weaken the EU…
Dr. John Laughland: No, I don’t agree with that. I don’t think that the US is trying to weaken the EU. I don’t think that the EU has any existence outside the American orbit. In other words, none of the EU states have any desire, as far as one can tell, certainly not the major ones, to have any political independence at all from the USA. On the contrary, they systematically side with America, even in much more serious conflicts than the Ukrainian conflict.
As you know, only last week Britain and France, and other countries have joined in America’s bombing attacks on the IS in Iraq. And this is a clear sign that the main EU powers and the EU itself is ideologically determined not even to remain allied with America, but to become even more allied with it than before. Jean-Claude Juncker – the President of the European Commission – has said that the signature of the Transatlantic free trade zone is the priority of his term in office as Commission President.
Of course, there might be disagreements between the European officials and the Americans on particular sectors. It is true that they may wish, for example, to keep the agriculture out of the agreement. But agriculture has traditionally been kept out of all free trade agreements. So, you know, I regard that as a minor obstacle.
What they definitely do want, however, is to sign the treaty and thereby to create, as I say, this Transatlantic economic and, above all, of course, political unit which will be based on the free trade zone.
Which actually places the US in the middle of a new entity with Transatlantic agreement, and the Transpacific pact also being negotiated now. Do you think that this center will be able to effectively sustain the giant structure?
Dr. John Laughland: That’s a difficult question to answer. I don’t really know what to say about that. I mean, in the long term nothing in human life is permanent. You know, as you said in your earlier question, all empires collapse. Yes, particularly big structures, they obviously are difficult to maintain.
But what we see really with the current state of affairs, is that the Americans are, I suppose you could say, running – if I can use a rather strange analogy – it is a little bit like a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme, as you know, is the word for a financial fraud, where people make money from getting an increasingly large number of investors to come into an investment. And by ever increasing the number of people coming in, the people running the scheme can profit. Another word for the same thing is the pyramid scheme.
The Americans for the time being have maintained their pyramid scheme, because the NATO continues to enlarge. Two countries – Croatia and Albania – joined within the last year or a year and a half. Other countries are in the queue. The free trade pact is in the pipeline. You know, there are no centrifugal forces at the moment. There are no countries threatening to leave any of these structures. On the contrary, there are countries that want to join them. Ukraine is of course the most recent example and it is a big example. So, we are a long way from the tide turning at the moment”.
