By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
Dritan Abazovic says: “The idea of the Open Balkans has been rather poorly communicated from the start.” And he also says: “If you tell people that this is the idea behind the ‘great-power’ projects, they’re logically against it. But when you explain to them that this is not really true and that the point is that they will no longer wait at the borders, that we will jointly apply for infrastructure projects and fight organized crime more strongly, the perception then changes. The region needs trust, and that’s impossible to develop if we see hostility in everything.”
He adds: “For us, the EU is the top priority and the final stop on the reform path. If we look at the Open Balkans as an alternative to the EU, then we are not in favor of that, but I’m not sure that this initiative is in conflict with European integration.”
My friend Ljubo Filipovic also joined Dritan in accepting the Open Balkans as an “inevitability”. What to say: I love my friends, but I love the truth even more.
Dritan – not to mention Ljubo – is a far better Christian than me. I, for example, see an act of hostility in an act of hostility, while Dritan sees the outstretched hand of his neighbor. A JNA tank passes through my apartment, Karadzic’s army kills several of my friends with grenades, and his sniper kills my friend’s child – and I see it as an act of hostility. Well, I’m such a vengeful person. I have so little confidence in gunners and snipers, as well as the ideology that led them.
And yet, I agree: one should not see hostility in everything. It should be found solely in hostility. Otherwise, you are not good and tolerant, but an idiot – in my humble opinion.
I’d like to add: the idea of an Open Balkans is well communicated. We understood each other very well. The idea of the Open Balkans follows the idea of the Serbian World, which is a version of the idea of a Greater Serbia, being the version of the idea of Moljevic’s Homogeneous Serbia. If I understood Dritan well, the idea would have been “better communicated” if Vulin, Vučić’s puppet, had avoided mentioning the Serbian World. It’s true only if better communication means mimicry and lying.
The Open Balkans also perfectly follows the idea of Natural Albania. It seems that Dritan and Rama now have an idea that this idea should be “better communicated” (for me, for example, it’d be enough if someone can explain how the idea is “communicated”, and not stated or explained), but I claim again: we communicated well, we understood everything.
I’ll add that trust in the region would be much stronger if Serbia and Albania hushed the ideas of the Serbian World and Natural Albania, than asking us to “communicate better” with the great power and pretending that what is obvious and publicly announced does not exist.
Dritan demands from Montenegro citizens to apply the ostrich strategy: when you see a train rushing towards you, do not get off the rails, but suppress mistrust by burying your head in the sand. Dritan is knocking on the door, because this strategy is not unfamiliar to humanity, not even to Montenegrins. There are few who are aware that the light at the end of the tunnel is most likely a train going to meet you. Mankind is happy to deal with them, so there are fewer and fewer of them. Speaking meaningfully essentially means causing a scandal. The intolerance that humanity, including Montenegrins, shows towards common sense, especially those who are armed with knowledge, usually results in the investigation of non-idiots, and that in turn results in folk festivities and hyperinflation of happiness. Ecstasy, so to speak.
I’ve already written about that, but let me repeat: here is what I see as a problem with the idea of the Open Balkans, no matter how Dritan “communicated”.
First of all: Vucic, Rama and then Zaev, the latter in the role of a useful idiot, promoted the bizarre Mini Schengen, renamed it and with that insult to common sense waved like a flag, offering it to the world as their great “international initiative”. If they had thought a little better, they would have understood that this idea is not a proof of their greatness, but of their insignificance: if Tito’s Non-Aligned were the Himalayas, their Open Balkans is Avala. Or Rozafa, whatever.
No miracles. There are only tricks and illusions. The Open Balkans, a great power disguised as an economy and good neighborliness, is nothing more than an amateur trick performed at a village fair.
Why?
The finance ministers of the Montenegrin and Serbian governments, Milojko Spajic and Sinisa Mali, recently discussed the “benefits of the Open Balkans initiative”. And how would it be if Minister Spajic shared these advantages with the citizens of Montenegro? We’d be grateful if he can do it before he, along with Dritan, “secretly and organizedly” plunge us into the Balkan alliance in which Montenegro has no interest? But no: apart from the story of “regional cooperation” and “connection”, which sounds like an empty can of Campbell’s soup rolling down a steep street, no one has heard anything about the benefits of Vucic-Rama’s brainchild. Their child, the parents claim, is gifted – but seen from the side, through the eyes of an observer unwilling to invest (and devour) warm emotions, he acts, frankly, like an evil idiot.
The Montenegrin government stays silent. The public stays silent. Until one day, instead of in the promised EU, wanted by a huge number of Montenegrin citizens, we find ourselves in the Balkan Union, about which no one asked the citizens.
While Dritan ponders over the advantages, let me mention a few obvious disadvantages of this repackaged, rebranded – ah, what can I say – big-state project.
One. Joining the Open Balkans means “goodbye to the EU”. So, let me repeat, it means just that. European media reported about it. It may be so, but they say that democracy means that someone asks the citizens about it: are you in favor of, after years and years of negotiations with the EU and harmonization of domestic legislation with the “acquis communautaire”, after we allowed EU embassies to practically run our country in the name of future membership in the “prestigious club”, throwing it all away and being in an old, good Balkan inn decorated with a new, glowing neon sign in English?
Two. The Open Balkans is formally a copy of the already existing Berlin Process – except that this buffalo initiative is not led by Berlin, but by Belgrade and Tirana.
Three. The Open Balkans is, let me repeat, a renamed “Mini Schengen”, just as the Serbian World was renamed Greater Serbia, and Natural Albania, well… Greater Albania. 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.
Of course, it won’t 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 Vlachs don’t figure it out”… It will start with free trade and the flow of people, because it is, you know, as they tell us, “economic and not political agreement”. Just as the EU started with coal and steel. It will end with a joint parliament and joint border control.
Why do I think like that? Because Vucic himself said so. Here’s his statement: “Serbs, Albanians and Macedonians are no less smart and valuable than the French, Germans, Italians and others who set out to build the EU through the Coal and Steel Community.” The man 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 correspond to the megalomaniac, 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 neighbors.
Vucic’s and Rama’s Open Balkans is a model that would ensure that, instead of being defeated and rejected, the two great-power projects – which are the biggest threat to the security of this region – are settled and realized. In a state scalamery made by Vucic and Rama, “all Serbs/all Albanians in one state” would really happen. Like back in 1918, it’s presented as a supposedly “progressive” idea of togetherness and cooperation. So you should now dare to reject what’s “advanced” and in the “spirit of integration” …
I’m wondering something … And who has so far prevented Vucic and Rama, as well as Serbs and Albanians in general, 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 Mini Schengen was presented, as well as the 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 economy is also “the area of security”, right?
It also means removing 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 don’t pay taxes for it? 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, Montenegro citizens could work on the construction sites in Tetovo, Surdulica and Korca, so we are on the same page, right? Everyone has the same chances, right? Montenegro’s interest is for Serbia to buy its Elektroprivreda – because if we’re in the union, we share electricity, we share the sea, isn’t it so? It is.
By the way … One would say that the afore-mentioned goals of the “Open Balkans” were achieved back in 1992. At that time, full “cross-border security cooperation” was realized between Serbia and part of Bosnia and Herzegovina – today it’s called the Republika Srpska entity.
Aleksandar Vucic himself had the chance to see what that cooperation looks like when he visited the Serbian artillery positions above Sarajevo, at the Jewish cemetery. He traveled from Belgrade to Sarajevo without a passport and without any border and customs control, which means that even then, free movement of (especially armed) people was ensured. As well as the free movement of goods (especially weapons).
Five. The idea that “economic cooperation” will pacify Balkan nationalisms is both deadly and hilarious in its idiocy. Above all, it’s dangerous because the inevitable (not so distant) disintegration of that community would mean a new war.
That’s right. Dritan won’t mention that to you, but I would think about it if I were you … Do we have experience with the disintegration of complex state creations? We do. Did that disintegration lead to the 1941 massacre? Yes. And did the 1991 demise pass without slaughter? It didn’t. So why do you think that tomorrow’s disintegration of Vucic-Rama’s Kingdom of Serbs and Albanians will pass 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 just when we were the richest in our entire history. Then when Markovic boosted the Yugoslav economy, when it seemed like an economic miracle was happening.
I claim there are no miracles, but don’t you listen to me and all the other mockingbirds. Do one. I mean a miracle. Do not stand behind the cunning packed in noble and progress, the one that seeks your freedom and blood in the name of a better tomorrow.
