A snappy young Serbian woman with two degrees from universities in the USA comes back to Belgrade to live and work. She gets a good job in a major Serbian bank on the corporate communications side.

She gives a presentation to the bank top brass on how the bank can transform its working methods and effectiveness by using new technology. General delight and applause – they’re all impressed.

But after the presentation one of the senior bank executives comes up to her and says "You know, all that clever stuff will never work here. When people look at the sky they tread in dog-shit." She, startled, asks him to repeat his words. He does so.

Next day she hands in her resignation – she won’t stay in a place with such foul people and such an attitude to reform, self-improvement and growth.

Serbia loses – again.

* * * * *

Thus it was that yesterday I found myself at the Belgrade Forum For The (sic) World Of Equals conference, an event supposed intended to discuss the prospects for European Security after the USA, Russia, French and other elections in 2012.

The Belgrade Forum is the place where old Milosevic supporters go to die. It is lead by Zivadin Jovanovic, a friendly but formalistic Yugo-communist career diplomat who achieved the anti-distinction of ending up as Milosevic’s Foreign Minister after Milosevic was indicted by ICTY.

The Forum champions turgid pseudo-analytical ideas such as this:

Internal democracy is inconceivable without democracy in international affairs, and vice versa. It would be a sad future for the mankind if internal one should be based on the principle of hierarchy instead of the principle of democracy! As early as at the low-level economic, technologic, democratic and cultural development, the society chose to discard rubber-stamping and dictate as the means of the retrograde politics.

Certainly, there is no rationale to revive such theories and efforts, such as, for instance, is the theory on “limited sovereignty” and the like. For example, which Western European or North American country would accept an open interfering in its electoral process in the name of globalization and “new notions of sovereignty and territorial integrity”?

… Belgrade Forum strongly condemns any discrimination and double standards, be it in the area of human rights or any other areas, and endorses full observance of both international and national law.

I particularly cherish the idea that Internal democracy is inconceivable without democracy in international affairs, and vice versa. What this actually means is an extreme ‘relativisation’ of any sort of principles – that any nasty little dictatorship has exactly the same moral validity and international standing as a normal democracy.

The logic is something like this:

  • all states are equal under international law – the votes of brutalised human rights dustbins such as Zimbabwe, Syria and Cuba are as politically – and morally – significant as the votes of Finland, Canada and Poland when it comes to setting the rules of global order, including (nay especially) human rights norms themselves
  • therefore no state has the right to ‘interfere’ in another state’s internal affairs
  • therefore even if Milosevic was a monster (which of course he wasn’t), that’s no-one else’s business but Serbia’s
  • because Milosevic’s Serbia was democratic, see?
  • and because we’re so democratic, we can stop the majority of people of Kosovo voting to escape our benign, democratic rule even after we have treated them with semi-racist disdain for some fifty years

The conference duly lived up to these noble principles, with different Serbian speakers bewailing Serbia’s fate at the hands of sundry ‘aggressors’. But as the event had generous Russian sponsors, there was an added bonus – various Russian experts and other foreign speakers brought in, mainly to extol the virtues of Vladimir Putin!

These two themes combined in a creepy way. In one laboured presentation after another Serbian speakers gushed their praise of Russia’s ‘principled stand’ and ‘patriotic’ strength and wisdom. The Russian experts (who being Russian experts evinced a certain steely professionalism and realism amidst the general embarrassment) beamed benignly at this painful sycophancy.

Part of the Russian argument about European security turned on what was said to be the growing role of the CSTO. This, for people not familiar with the politics of the former Soviet space, is a collective security organisation bringing together a number of former Soviet republics. The main political point of this organisation is to head off former republics joining NATO. Armenia has dutifully signed up, along with such otherwise likely NATO members as Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Russia and Tajikistan.

So question for Serbia. Should Serbia show how independent it truly is and join CSTO? And question for Russia – would you really want these strutting whiny Milosevic Serbs in this happy post-Soviet family photograph?

No-one really wanted to talk about this in any serious way, because of course it’s not serious. But instead the thought was wafted round the conference room now and again, like an Orthodox priest swinging a malodorous thurible, to create a mood of naughty ‘anti-imperialist’ and anti-European defiance.

In this absurd setting it was impossible to say anything sensible. My modest contribution argued that the sprawling institutional legacy of the Cold War (OSCE, NATO, EU, CSTO, Helsinki accords and so on) was slowly losing authority, and that massed citizens power spurred by new technology was challenging political elites from below. Plus for most of the previous three centuries or so Europe (and Americanised Europeans) had defined the world – now the world was starting to define us. We all needed new ideas about what ‘security’ actually meant in these circumstances, based upon some shared positive values such as pluralism and transparency based on the ‘consent of the governed’.

However, I also threw in for good measure the proposition that the Kosovo situation first and foremost had been a defeat for Belgrade policies, where ‘Belgrade’ represented the capital of Serbia, the policies of Milosevic and the general Serb worldview.

This trite thought provoked a lot of graceless spluttering noises from one Dragan Todorovic, a Serbian Radical Party MP. He then used his presentation to rave away about the glories of Russia and the CSTO, and attacked my cynicism and (yes!) double-standards:

His country defended the Falkland islands for the sake of the sheep, and he denies Serbia the right to defend Kosovo!

Nice one. Lost in his own bewildered burbling, he missed 100% the rather important policy point that a majority if not 100% of the Falklands population wanted to stay with the UK, whereas the great majority of Kosovo’s population want to get away from Belgrade rule (and indeed from people like him). 

* * * * *

Conclusion?

Back in 1996 I told Republika Srpska leader Mrs Plavsic, later to serve time at ICTY for war crimes, that too many Serbs reminded me of people who stood on a busy motorway waving the traffic code and crying that everyone was driving too fast: "Good point, but you get run over!"

The sort of attitudes represented at this event yesterday represent complete doom for Serbia.

Look, Serbia. Please listen carefully. ‘Ajde slušaj bre!

I agree with the broad proposition that the EU/USA did not really understand the dynamics of the former Yugoslavia, and did not have a clear plan for managing the reasonable and unreasonable expectations of the Serbs as the largest community in SFRY.

So Milosevic had some good points to make. But he time after time blew his opportunity to accept and work with potentially friendly partners by being stupid and violent. One Russian diplomat told me how he’d walked out in disgust after hours of idiotic wrangling and sheer nonsense with him.

The result now is a severely weakened and degraded Serbia – the Cost of Milosevic has compounded up to staggering levels. If that isn’t a Belgrade policy failure, tell me what one is.

Yes, you’re right. Much of the Western world imposed sanctions, then NATO bombed you. That didn’t help. But why did this happen? Could it just possibly perhaps maybe have had a little something to do with Belgrade’s policies? And, if so, what might you learn from that to do better next time?

Now what?

It’s fine by the EU and NATO if you don’t join either of us! Really. Especially if you don’t join the EU: British taxpayers won’t have to give you lots of free money.

Do what the hell you like. Join the CSTO or ASEAN or create a new progressive Union with Belarus, North Korea and Cuba. Whatever! Just do it. then accept the consequences of your own choices like an adult.

You’re good fun when you want to be, but your problems and insecurities have long since ceased to matter much. And please don’t hold back other former Yugoslavia communities – or even people in Vojvodina – who think that, frankly, Belgrade’s neurotic political classes are just a bit too weird these days.

That said, if Serbia wants to have some self-respect and stop its young people resigning from good jobs and growing up in squalid corrupt towns and cities, try to adopt policies which create wealth and attract investment. Present at least some good ideas.

Sound positive! Friendly! Nice! Don’t recycle exhausted Yugo-communist clichés, delivered by exhausted Yugo-communists.

And don’t expect Putin-style Russians to care for you either. They know you’re weak and demoralised. And that suits them just fine. They’ll tend to look on you the way Stalin sneered at uppity Milovan Djilas and boasted about the way the Red Army raped its way down into Serbia:

The Russians will give you all sorts of glittering trophies, because they know finely to calibrate your impoverished expectations. Then they’ll buy what’s left of your industry for knock-down prices.

True Serbian glory. Achieved at last:

O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast!

Two sljivovica-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right… He loved Big Brother.