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Open Balkans? Thanks, we’re okay with the EU

Spajić i Mali

By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist

Open Balkans. That is, as Vucic, Rama and Zaev claim – Open Balkan. The seriousness of a creator of the initiative is best proved with the name of their invention – wrongly written. If they wanted to use an English word, it’s not ‘the Balkan’ but ‘the Balkans’.

New name for an old Vucic’s and Rama’s initiative. It sounds like a tennis tournament: US Open, Australian Open, French Open, Balkans Open… But unfortunately, it’s not.

The ministers of finances in the governments of Montenegro and Serbia, Milojko Spajic and Sinisa Mali, discussed “the benefits of the Open Balkans initiative” these days.

Maybe Minister Spajic should consider sharing those benefits with the citizens of Montenegro? If can do it before he again “secretly and in an organized manner” puts us in the Balkan alliance with no interests for Montenegro? But no: despite the stupid story about the “regional cooperation” and “interconnection”, no one has heard about the advantages of the Vucic-Rama project. The Montenegrin government stays silent. The public stays silent. Until one day, when we, instead in the promised EU wanted by a huge number of Montenegrin citizens, find ourselves in the Balkan Union, about which no one asked the citizens, nor informed them.

While Mali and Spajic are discussing advantages, allow me to mention several obvious shortcomings of that repackaged, rebranded large-scale project.

One. Joining the Open Balkans means “goodbye to the EU”. The European media report about it. It can be done, but someone should ask the citizens about it: do you want, after years and years of negotiations with the EU and harmonization of domestic legislation with the “acquis communautaire of the European Union”, after we allowed the embassies of the EU countries to, in the name of the future membership in a “prestigious club”, practically run our country, to discard it all and end up in an old, good Balkan inn decorated with a new, glowing neon sign in English?

Two. Open Balkans is a copy of the already existing Berlin process – only that this fake initiative is not led by Berlin, but by Belgrade and Tirana. This gives the phrase “you went backwards” a whole different meaning… 

Three. “Open Balkans” is renamed “Little Schengen”, just as the “Serbian World” is another word for “Greater Serbia”. Speaking about “Little Schengen” at the time, Vucic and Rama said that it was not the new Yugoslavia. It’s true. It’s something much worse than that – a replica of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. More precisely: what they are trying to do is the Kingdom of Serbs and Albanians.

It will not, of course, formally be a kingdom. But there will be no democracy either – on the contrary, there will be a bunch of authoritarian leaders, each of whom, in practice, will be king in the territory he controls. There will, of course, be a lot of nationalism, and even more corruption than there has been so far…

Of course, that state / alliance will not be proclaimed immediately – as long as “the Vlasi don’t remember”… It will start with free trade and the flow of people, because it’s, you know, as they tell us, “an economic and not a political agreement”. Just as the EU started with coal and steel. It will end up with a joint parliament and joint border control.

Why do I think so? Because Vucic himself said so. Here’s his statement from the day before yesterday: “Serbs, Albanians and Macedonians are no less smart and hardworking than the French, Germans, Italians and others who set out to build the EU through the Coal and Steel Community.” This man along with Rama is making his version of the EU, in which Belgrade will be Berlin and Tirana – Paris. Or vice versa. In any case, in that arrangement, Podgorica would be Dobroesti – a village near Bucharest.

Such an alliance may suit the megalomaniacal, deeply anachronistic nature of Greater Albanian and Greater Serbian nationalism, but it doesn’t suit Montenegro, which, in that arrangement, is only a territory that will be divided into spheres of interest by these two nationalisms.

However… A century after the great powers created the Kingdom of SCS, they (or at least some of them) are trying to “implement” an experiment of striking similarity in the Balkans.

After the First World War, France and the other victors wanted the Little Entente in the Balkans: so they made Karadjordjevic’s Yugoslavia. It’s not so important that it was the worst state that could be made by either man or animals – it, that state, after all, ended its life with atrocities. If it were not for Tito and the partisans, who created something completely different on the ruins of that state, its axiological opposite, the idea of South Slavic unity would have remained inscribed in letters blacker than cuttlefish ink, blacker than Black Hand, in the imaginary book of common history.

What it looks like when the West makes a complex state in the Balkans, according to its needs, we saw back in 1918. According to the then geopolitical projections, primarily France, the state of Montenegro, for example, was erased. Its dynasty was overthrown, the parliament and the constitution were destroyed, every subjectivity of that internationally recognized state was erased, after which Serbia was allowed to annex it. Then, a few years ago, the French publicly apologized to the living descendants of the Petrovic Njegos dynasty and Montenegro. And now the empire wants to create conditions for the same thing to happen to Montenegro again. What can I tell you: anyone who was so stupid to believe in the sincerity and stories of the “civilization and values” of empires deserved everything that the empire would do to him.

Vucic’s and Rama’s “Little Schengen” renamed “Open Balkans” is a model that would ensure that, instead of being defeated and rejected, two large-scale projects that are the biggest threat to the security of this region – are settled and realized. In the state scam made by Vucic and Rama, it’d really be possible to have: “all Serbs / all Albanians in one state”.

Like in 1918, it’s shown as a supposedly “progressive” idea of togetherness and cooperation. And now reject what’s “advanced” and in the “spirit of integration”…

I’m wondering something … Who has so far prevented Vučić and Rama from cooperating? What was the obstacle to cooperation and normalization of relations if not their nationalisms, which should now be fed by Bosnia, Montenegro and Macedonia?

When “Little Schengen” was presented, the same as for “Open Balkans”, it was announced, I quote the authors of the idea, that it also means “strengthening cross-border cooperation in the field of security”.

“The field of security” is also the economy, right?

It points to the removal of borders and free movement of people.

Four. “The economic interest” of Montenegro and its tourism is that foreigners buy and rent houses on the Montenegrin coast and not pay taxes for that? Montenegro’s interest is that money from Montenegrin tourism pours into cash registers outside Montenegro? The interest of Montenegrin citizens is that cheap labor from Serbia, Macedonia and Albania floods the Montenegrin coast and takes over all jobs? But it doesn’t matter: on the other hand, Montenegrin citizens could work on the construction sites in Tetovo, Surdulica and Korca, and we are on the same page, right? Everyone has the same chances, right? Montenegro’s interest is for Serbia to buy its Elektrodistribucija  – because if we are in a community, we have electricity in common, we also have in common the sea, right? That’s right.

By the way … One may say that the determined goals of the “Open Balkans” were achieved in 1992. At that time, full “cross-border cooperation in the field of security” was realized between Serbia and part of Bosnia and Herzegovina – today it’s called Republika Srpska.

Aleksandar Vucic himself had the opportunity to see what that cooperation looked like, when he visited Serbian artillery positions above Sarajevo at the time. He traveled from Belgrade to Sarajevo without a passport and without any border and customs control, which means that even then, free movement of (particularly armed) people was ensured. As well as the free movement of goods (particularly weapons).

Five. The idea that “economic cooperation” will pacify Balkan nationalisms is both deadly and hilarious in its idiocy. It’s, above all, dangerous because the inevitable (not so distant) disintegration of that community would mean a new war.

That’s right. Spajić won’t mention it to you, but if I were you, I’d think about it … Do we have experience with the demise of complex state creations? We have. Did that demise lead to the 1941 massacre? It did. And did the 1991 demise pass without slaughter? It did not. So why do you think that tomorrow’s demise of Vucic-Rama’s Kingdom of Serbs and Albanians will happen without slaughter?

Representatives of the “school of thought”, according to which the economy and the free market are a cure for nationalism, say that conflicts arise from poverty, while the development of the economy encourages stability.

Let me remind you: Tito’s Yugoslavia fell apart and the slaughter began, not when we were poor, but when we were the richest in its entire history. Then when Markovic boosted the Yugoslav economy, when it seemed like an economic miracle was happening.

There’s no miracle. There are only tricks and illusions. The Open Balkans – a great power disguised as an economy and good neighborly relations is nothing more than an amateur trick performed at a village fair.

 

 

 

 

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