Balkan pathways
Dual tracks after votes in Serbia and Bulgaria
Bulgaria and Serbia have both just elected new leaders; those two countries and some of the rest of particularly central and eastern Europe are trying to find their way in a 2017 continent between the European Union and NATO and a more aggressive Russia.
Serbia and Bulgaria have particularly sensitive paths to tread. Both are majority Orthodox Christian in their religious faiths, like Russia. Bulgaria was the closest of the old Soviet Union’s allies in the Warsaw Pact and COMECON, the Russian-dominated economic union. Serbia is largely Orthodox also and has tried to use its relationship with Russia to help it keep the more Western parts of the European Union and the United States off its back.
Bulgaria, which chose Boyko Borisov as prime minister last month, joined the EU in 2007, and benefited from membership. At the same time, a culture of corruption has continued to prevail there, undercutting economic development, partly through presenting sometimes a less than attractive investment climate. Mr. Borisov in particular was a previous prime minister, not entirely a great favorite of outsiders or of Bulgarians themselves.
Serbia was the dominant partner in the former Yugoslavia, having inherited most of its armed forces, and thus having been in a position to try to dominate at least some of the rest of the other pieces of Josip Broz Tito’s former empire. That didn’t work out too well in the end for Serbia, as it attracted the largely unfavorable attention of NATO and the United States as it rampaged across Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, ostensibly to protect ethnic Orthodox Serbs living there.
Serbia elected Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic as president on Sunday, in a field of 11 candidates. The country is still knocking on the EU door, while seeking to maintain its ties to Russia and President Vladimir Putin.
Of the former Yugoslav republics, Croatia and Slovenia have succeeded in joining the EU, and Macedonia and Montenegro are on the way. Croatia and Slovenia are in NATO. Serbia is still struggling to join the EU, prevented to some degree by its continuing mischief in Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the latter, it has not been able to make itself stop encouraging the Serbian-ethnic portion of Bosnia-Herzegovina in its efforts not to integrate politically and economically with the Croat and Muslim portions of that still-fractured republic.
The 1992-95 war in BosniaHerzegovina was brought to an end by clever and forceful diplomacy by the United States, embodied in the socalled Dayton Accords, but the structure America and its allies left in place there is pretty much unworkable as government for the country. What is badly needed is another all-party conference, including Russia, the EU and the United States as well as representatives of the country’s national components, to restructure the government into a form more appropriate to national composition and rule. The EU can help by not letting Bosnia-Herzegovina or Serbia in until that problem has been resolved.
The United States needs to keep in touch with all of the still-floating parties, Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, encouraging them to be reasonable, to insist on resolving their common problems rather than sawing on their differences. Apart from that, their fates are European, not American, problems. It is not particularly useful to see their individual situations in terms of U.S.-vs.-Russian competition.