In the end, Vučić surprised everyone — with an early concession. “It is clear,” he said, as he took meekly to the podium at SNS headquarters, “that we have lost these elections.” The most powerful man in Serbia for 14 years, a leader who had carefully cultivated a strongman image, stepped down without even a hint of resistance. What made his acknowledgment of defeat even more miraculous was who he lost to: the Student List (SL), a new outfit that emerged out of two years of mass protests. Every one of SL’s 250 candidates had been selected through decentralized student plenums; none was a professional politician. Among them were academics, doctors, lawyers, artists, and athletes. For political novices, the scale of victory amounted to an electoral coup. According to CRTA, an independent pollster, Student List received 52.45% of the vote, while Vučić’s “United Serbia” list received just 39.2%. At just under 70%, turnout was the highest it has been in decades.

Vučić’s defeat sent thousands of people streaming onto the streets across Serbia. Belgrade’s Slavija Square, a traffic roundabout with a large fountain in the middle, became a spontaneous meeting point for mass celebrations. With all traffic stopped, revelers commandeered trams, climbed on top of bus shelters and the rooftops of buildings, and danced the kolo, a traditional folk dance. More than one stranger collapsed sobbing into my arms. It was a multigenerational celebration: university students brought their parents, and toddlers perched on shoulders. Some waved red football flares and set off deafening fireworks. Countless members of the crowd kept repeating “14 years” in a daze and in disbelief. Others chanted “pobeda!” — “victory!”. Some removed chairs from “Ćaciland”, a pro-Vučić encampment across the street from the parliament building, which had become a symbol of the confrontation between the student movement and the government. 

“We’re celebrating our freedom for the first time in 30 years, not 14 years, but 30 years,” Katarina, covered in pins and other Student List regalia, explained to me amid the cacophony. The “30 years” refers to a widely held belief that after the revolution that brought down Slobodan Milošević on 5 October 2000, not nearly enough changed. In Serbia, some even like to say “there was no October 6th”, meaning there was no real reckoning with the past or the atavistic authoritarian strain in society. Following Milošević’s fall, Serbia never underwent a thorough transitional justice process, leaving broad swaths of the security sector unreformed and former ministers like Vučić free to again take power. Student List has vowed to remedy this, and to undertake a rigorous purge that will hold former SNS officials accountable.

It’s about time. Past protest movements against Vučić had always generated excitement, only to peter out within a few months. But the student-led protests never slowed down. The trigger for the two years of unrest was grief, which quickly transmuted into rage. On 1 November 2024, a train-station canopy collapsed in the northern city of Novi Sad, killing 16 people. Many believed a recent renovation of the canopy had been hindered by corruption. The slogan of the ensuing protests was “corruption kills”, and their symbol was a bloody red handprint. The canopy renovation reportedly cost more than five times as much as the original estimate said it would, and the main project was awarded without a conventional public tender. For many in Serbia, indeed, the canopy collapse was symbolic of a deteriorating country. Under Vučić, critics say, Serbia has become a place where building contracts are awarded based on personal connections; where state institutions are staffed and stripped for parts by regime loyalists; and where health and safety are barely an afterthought.

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Indeed, the Vučić government’s corruption scandals have been legion. In April 2016, masked men demolished buildings in Belgrade’s Savamala district near the planned luxury development Belgrade Waterfront in the middle of the night. The buildings had been blocking construction of the Emirati-funded development, which was part of a deal overseen by Vučić. For years, many have believed that he or someone in his inner circle had ordered it, and on the eve of the election, the former Belgrade chief of municipal police confirmed it. Vučić is also widely said to have a close working relationship with violent football fans and organized crime.

Little wonder, then, that some of the student protests were attended by more than 300,000 people, by far the largest since Milošević’s fall. With little access to the Vučić-dominated media, the students managed to find new ways to boost their visibility. They blockaded the faculties of universities, resulting in nearly six months of disruption to academic life. Hoping to gain the attention of EU officials, who for years regarded good relations with the strongman as a necessary evil for maintaining regional stability and keeping more dangerous ultranationalists under control, some students rode from Serbia to Strasbourg and Brussels on bikes. And, during countless street protests, they held silent vigil while standing in the street, always for exactly 16 minutes — one for each life lost in the canopy collapse.

During the past two years of protest, Vučić attempted to stem the discontent in a number of ways. First, he thought he would simply wait for the protesters to wear themselves out, just like their predecessors had. When that didn’t work, he tried sacrificing some of his closest associates. Early last year, Vučić had his Prime Minister, Miloš Vučević, resign, in an effort to appease the students. But when that failed, Vučić took more drastic measures. In one particularly jarring episode, the government allegedly used a so-called “sonic weapon” against protesters, prompting people to scatter in a sudden panic. Police and SNS-linked thugs have also beaten protesters, in some cases severely.

All the while, Vučić depicted the protests as a Western-backed “color revolution”, while his surrogates have alleged that the movement is supported by “Ustaše”, a reference to the fascist organization that ruled Croatia during the Second World War, and which massacred Serbs, Jews and Roma. The government has also used Pegasus, a powerful Israeli spyware tool, to surveil protesters through their phones. And, in the days preceding the vote, police raided SL offices and the private homes of several SL activists. At least seven people were arrested, accused of planning election-day unrest. But the students and their supporters were undeterred. As more than one told me, “We’re not afraid anymore.” Faced with determined opposition, and with his own party’s support in steep decline, Vučić likely decided that stepping down was preferable to a bloody street revolution.

The students’ most impressive feat was transforming street protest into a viable electoral vehicle. First, SL was adamant that no single leader would come to dominate the movement. This prevented opportunists from hijacking the protests for their own agenda, and excluded the kinds of narcissistic personalities who have historically gravitated toward Serbian politics. This also guarded against replicating the same personalist style that has disfigured Serbian politics for decades. The leaderlessness of the movement made it harder for Vučić to launch salacious smear campaigns against opponents in pro-government tabloids, a signature of his rule that always kept his political rivals cowed. Serbia’s official opposition were also excluded from the movement from early on, as they were often tainted by association with past scandals. As Savo Manojlović, a member of the Belgrade city assembly, and leader of a movement that supported Student List told me, “a crucial role in this process has been played by the emergence of new, uncompromised faces on the political scene”.

Student List is also ideologically heterogeneous, encompassing conservative nationalists, pro-EU liberals, and Leftists in its ranks. Indeed, the diversity of political thought in the movement is itself a testament to the obloquy in which Vučić is held. On Sunday night, Serbian flags and Orthodox Christian iconography predominated among the crowd of revelers, but there were also socialists celebrating in keffiyehs, and even some muted expressions of “Yugonostalgia”. Yet if that “big tent” approach proved effective at winning elections, critics can rightly point out that the lack of clear ideology will ultimately make it difficult to govern. Indeed, absent the singular, unifying cause of bringing down Vučić, SL members may soon find that more divides them than unites them. It helps, at least, that SL claims it does not necessarily aim to transform itself into a traditional political party like the SNS. Instead, members hope to use the movement to dismantle the Vučić regime: then create the conditions for fair ideological and political competition in future. In other words, SL is the custodian of Serbia’s transition to a genuinely democratic system.

SL has also been deliberately ambiguous about most aspects of foreign policy. This was partly a strategic decision, made to keep the focus on Vučić’s domestic malfeasance. As Vuk Vuksanović, a lecturer in foreign policy and grand strategy at King’s College London, tells me, SL’s victory actually means that foreign policy will change the least of any area of Serbian governance. “The Balkans are now a region where people are preoccupied with things closer to home,” Vuksanović says. Indeed, much of SL’s official program deviates little from the SNS line. Under Vučić, Serbia maintained good relations with both the US and Russia, along with China and the EU. SL is already signaling that it will do the same. Yesterday, sociologist and SL representative Jovo Bakić went on RT to pledge that there would be no changes to Serbia-Russia relations, and that SL would continue Vučić’s policy of opposing sanctions on Russia.

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The one area where SL’s foreign policy does dramatically depart from its predecessor is on Israel. Vučić cultivated close ties with Tel Aviv through arms sales, and oversaw the recent inauguration of a new joint Israeli-Serbian drone factory near Belgrade. But SL explicitly says that it would end arms sales to Israel and increase aid to the Palestinians. SL deplores Israel’s wars on its neighbors and view Tel Aviv as one of Vučić’s strongest backers. On the issue of relations with the EU, meanwhile, SL has had to tread more lightly. The movement contains both europhiles and euroskeptics, so has sought to balance between both. “SL has been playing a middle ground,” Vuksanović tells me. “They cannot fully reject the EU because it’s Serbia’s biggest trading partner, meaning the economy depends on it, but they also can’t do hyper-globalism because it irritates conservatives.”

SL’s success at transforming a student-protest movement into an electoral vehicle capable of taking control of the state will undoubtedly be studied for years to come. Surely, many would-be Gen Z activists will see their success as a template ripe for emulation, especially as youth-led protests are spreading across the globe, from India to Albania, while riots rage across Western Europe. If nothing else, the SL example demonstrates that such movements can have other fates besides wanton destruction and fizzling out into nothingness. Indeed, what is perhaps most distinct about SL is that it never descended into street violence. In fact, it always actively discouraged it, aware that the government would use any acts of violence to demonize the movement and justify more repression. Last week, after the last major protest before the election on Slavija Square, students even picked up rubbish left behind by protesters. Yesterday, after the vote, the students cleaned up the park that once hosted Ćaciland. It was symbolic of the task ahead. Now that they’re in power, SL will be cleaning up the mess that earlier generations of Serbs have made for them.

Serbia’s protests began back in November 2024, after the concrete canopy of the Novi Sad train station collapsed, killing 16 people. The people were quick to blame the disaster on government corruption and incompetence. The station’s canopy, after all, had recently been renovated by Chinese engineers. And though the authorities insist the project was “up to European standards”, no one believes that, especially when the relevant documents remain classified. 

Yet if Novi Sad was the trigger, the longevity of Serbia’s protests imply a deeper and broader malaise. Over the last nine months, they’ve morphed from anger over a single issue to a general movement for change, one encompassing the country’s very civic identity. At the center of it all is President Aleksandar Vučić, who over the last decade has morphed from a far-Right nationalist to a supposedly pragmatic pro-EU figure. Along the way, he has come to epitomize two things: both the long-standing ambiguity of Serbia’s geopolitical position, and a broader continent-wide slide towards populist autocracy. 

In a sense, Vučić’s very person is ambiguous. A man of relentless will and fertile intelligence, he is also famed for his oddly feminine lips (one of his nicknames is “pussy lips”). He has been in power for 12 years, circumventing the constitutional term limit by “doing a Putin” and switching between being president and prime minister. Those on the streets have had enough — and many blame Vučić personally. “He’s been in power for so long now, that for many of the protestors that is like a half of their lives,” says Marija, a young professional who has attended several protests. 

Among other things, Marija accuses Vučić of hollowing out state institutions, instead framing national life around his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). Just as bad, she adds, is the fallout of the Novi Sad disaster. Apart from those still-unclassified files, she notes that only Serbs have yet been charged for the collapse. “It’s final proof for many not just of the cost of corruption but also the protection of foreign investors.” Other young demonstrators have similar complaints. “We want early elections, the reintroduction of democratic norms, an end of mass corruption,” says Stefan, an IT consultant. “We just want the chance to improve our lives.” Fair enough: with inflation around 5%, the cost of food and utilities rising, life here is getting tougher. 

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All this helps explain why, close to a year on, the protests are still going strong. As I walked through central Belgrade over the weekend, it was impossible to avoid the anti-government chatter after yet another demonstration. If, however, the anti-Vučić crowds are resolute, tensions have been rising. For eight months, things remained largely peaceful. But then, in June, police arrested hundreds of demonstrators, spurring their comrades to blockade roads. That, in turn, prompted the government to flood the streets with counter-demonstrators. Now, both sides are doubling down. Last week, anti-government protesters set the offices of the SNS on fire during a fifth consecutive night of protests.

The police responded with now-customary brutality in Belgrade and Novi Sad. In the city of Valjevo, they used stun grenades and tear gas on protestors. Dozens have since been injured in clashes, with hundreds more detained. According to one young activist named Milos, by now a veteran protester and talking to UnHerd using a pseudonym, the police are “brutal”, adding that they protect gangs of paid thugs to attack demonstrators. For his part, Vučić has said, with the type of prophylactic language beloved by dictators, that the government will not “remain unresponsive”.

It is, though, under pressure. SNS support has steadily eroded. According to a July poll, 54.8% now support the “student list” — an anti-government coalition, as the name suggests partly composed of the middle classes — compared to the 42.1% sticking to Vučić. But in the rural areas, and among the elderly, government support remains huge. The country, then, is polarized, even as some retired people are now coming out in support of the students, joined by less-educated Serbs tired of seeing their living standards drop. The President’s term ends in 2027, and he’s promised to step down then, hoping to mollify the public. But no one buys this; he’s said it too many times before.

All the while, the protests have brought out an increasingly autocratic strain in the President — and not just on the streets. The government now regularly accuses NGOs of plotting to destabilize the country with foreign funding. Serbian media is also less than free. Several pro-Vučić advertising agencies flood TV networks with overwhelmingly pro-government narratives. A 2022 study found Vučić received 44 hours of airtime over three months, 87% of it positive; the opposition got a mere three hours, and most of that was negative.

What has irked many young people I speak to here is that Serbia has been a candidate for EU accession since 2014. From then until 2020, the country received €1.1 billion a year from Brussels. In 2023 alone, it was responsible for 59.7% of Serbia’s total trade in goods. The EU, then, clearly has leverage over Serbia. But despite the protesters’ demands for security service reforms aligning closely with EU values, Brussels has said little about the upheaval, and almost nothing about the government crackdown.

No wonder many anti-government activists I met in Belgrade feel let down. There were noticeably few EU flags at the protests I attended. And while EU accession is not an official anti-government demand, it’s clear that people here were hoping for more from Brussels. “The EU betrayed those who believed in its values,” says Milos. “I believe government violence will increase. If so, we expect even greater resistance from citizens and more concrete support from other countries, and the European Union.”

I fear he will be disappointed. As Balkans analyst Tim Judah observes, the EU sees Serbia as one of Europe’s “stabilitocracies”, regimes that supposedly secure stability, pretend to espouse EU integration, but then engage in various insalubrious practices that undermine democracy and the rule of law. Vučić acts in increasingly authoritarian ways with limited pushback because he has so many avenues of leverage against the EU and the broader West.

As Judah explains, that begins with history. Though the wars of the Nineties feel distant now, Eurocrats still fear that latent ethnic tensions across the region could resurface. Certainly, memories are very much alive here in Belgrade. “The only genocide in the Balkans was against the Serbs” bawls white spray paint wrapped around a corner building in the city center, a reference to Croatian atrocities during the Second World War. Nearby, a former government building remains a deliberate ruin. It was bombed by Nato in 1999, and now stands as a monument to Western iniquity —though there have been attempts to turn it into a Trump Tower.

Vučić is also well-placed to play regional spoiler if he wants. An ally of ethnic Serbian leaders in Bosnia and Kosovo, he can easily encourage secessionist demands beyond his borders. As Serbia’s domestic crisis deepens, a Vučić who decides to stoke conflict across the Balkans to divert his people’s attention from internal problems could easily spark a toxic geopolitical conflagration.

Vučić’s leverage lies not just with the EU, but the West more broadly. Most immediately, and with the encouragement of both Brussels and DC, Serbia has been a huge arms exporter to Ukraine. From February 2022 to June 2024 alone, it exported $800 million worth of ammunition to Kyiv (which uses the same Soviet caliber stock), albeit via third parties. This is shadowed by other arms shipments, including artillery rockets and tank rounds. The US was also happy to see Belgrade to supply arms to Israel: it exported €42 million worth of arms to the Jewish state in 2024, a 30-fold jump from 2023.

Meanwhile, Rio Tinto, a British-Australian firm, is currently building a massive lithium mine in Serbia’s Jadar Valley. Set to be Europe’s largest, once completed it will fulfill 90% of Europe’s lithium needs, securing urgently needed supply chains for electric vehicles. Given the knife fight with China for rare earths, Brussels sees the project as having enormous strategic value. No less important, it needs Vučić to shepherd the scheme through in the face of huge domestic opposition: thanks to environmental concerns and the mine’s disruption to farmland. So if its policy toward the protests is unarticulated, it is clear: lie back and think of the lithium.

Vučić happily accepts Europe’s riches and frames EU accession as a goal, while he also makes friends elsewhere. China, so central to the Novi Sad station debacle, is a case in point. In November 2023, Belgrade signed a free trade deal with Beijing, the first of its kind in the region. Though Vučić claims the deal will lapse upon EU accession, if and when that happens, it almost certainly won’t. After all, China has also invested $10 billion in Serbia through the Belt and Road Initiative, mainly in infrastructure, and sent PPE and medical experts during the Covid crisis. “European solidarity does not exist,” Vučić declared at the time. “Serbia now turns its eyes to China.”

And if that again explains Vučić’s marked reluctance to investigate China’s role in the Novi Sad saga, Russia, too, enjoys a special role in Serbia. Belgrade imports its energy from there, while it also exports ammunition to Putin’s war machine via third parties, the mirror of its support for Ukraine. Vučić celebrates Victory Day in Moscow while the Kremlin says anti-government protests are Western-backed attempts at a color revolution — even as Serbia’s subtle diplomatic dance continues. The EU, after all, remains its leading investment partner, with Serbs enjoying visa-free travel to the bloc. 

Vučić’s strategy of leveraging East and West to maximize benefits for Serbia is, Judah argues, “embedded in the political DNA of Serbs.” It’s most fully exemplified in the figure of former Yugoslav leader Marshall Josip Broz Tito, who rooted his nation’s foreign policy in non-alignment, taking what he could get from all sides. When Tito took power in Yugoslavia, in 1945, he modeled much of his state on Soviet lines. The USSR supplied huge amounts of economic and military aid to its fellow socialist country, while Tito sent his officers to train in Moscow. At the same time, though, he was happy to receive arms from the US, which opened the door to military and economic aid from the West. In 1953, Tito even joined a military pact with soon-to-be Nato members Greece and Turkey, giving Yugoslavia effective access to the bloc without actually joining. 

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Serbia remains as non-aligned now as it was then, with Serbian officials boasting that their nation is ‘“the east of the West” and the “west of the East”. Given that modern-day Serbia lacks the size and resources of Tito’s Yugoslavia, Vučić must be even more adept at embracing the role and grabbing what he can. And with Brussels fatigued by enlargement negotiations with 10 countries, to say nothing of its epic problems from migration to energy, Vučić can be confident he won’t face much pushback. 

This, in the end, is the problem with the EU: it’s a supranational organization that speaks of its devotion to “universal” values, while its mandate is to quasi-govern a series of interlocking states with their own ethnic, political and historical narratives. Brussels must always balance a multiplicity of competing national interests if the train is to keep moving. And if this is clear enough in Belgrade, something similar is playing out elsewhere in Europe.

In December 2024, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico met with Putin in Moscow; Hungary’s Viktor Orbán made a similar visit in July. Both countries have curtailed free speech and clamped down on political opposition. Fico is now working to dismantle judicial independence and undermine anti-corruption efforts. The result, like in Serbia, is internal unrest. From January to March 2024, Slovakia saw over 150 protests, including one in February when 110,000 people took to the streets. This then provokes more autocratic behavior, which the EU must duly ignore. And, like in Serbia, Brussels knows it cannot allow these countries to choose an anti-Western path.

As for Serbia itself, the protests continue, and the country’s future remains unclear. Should the protestors’ demands be met, Serbia will face snap elections and significant government reforms, accompanied by an acceleration of EU integration. This scenario is, however, plausible only if the students manage to appease the varied factions that support them. Fail and the country will enter a period of political instability: an inevitable consequence of a fragmented opposition, ongoing economic disruptions, and a potential backlash from pro-government forces. Should this happen, Vučić would likely return to power, especially as he probably remains the only Serbian politician capable of navigating the country through its current turmoil. 

All the while, the unrest continues. One recent afternoon, as I walk through Belgrade surveying the mess from yet another protest, I notice a rubbish bin in which someone has dumped a sign. “Revolucija”, it says simply, defiance amid the detritus.

France and Britain have to work hard to make sense of each another, because in the manner of quarrelsome siblings, they are so different and yet so similar. They inherit roughly the same strategic cards — a modest nuclear arsenal; highly professional military forces, globally deployed, which are small in relation to the emerging Asian powers; and a Security Council seat which reflects the strategic realities of yesteryear. Sometimes these assets have been used for a common purpose, but often (as in the Gulf War of 2003) the strategic choices have been utterly different. Anyway, behind this week’s glitter and repartee, there is a quiet, anxious conviction shared by Downing Street and the Élysée. The ability to understand one another — which is the literal meaning of Entente — could once again, in the near future, become a matter of life and death for both countries. At least since the fall of communism, the probability of France and Britain fighting together in a hot war has never looked so high — so both governments have said. And even in scenarios well short of Armageddon, the two countries — as Western Europe’s principal military players — could well find themselves co-policing a fragile ceasefire on the eastern edge of Europe. 

As in 1904, France and Britain see an imperative to transcend their many differences because of the emergence in Europe of an expansionist power whose appetite for territory and strategic might seems to be growing by the month. In the early 20th century, the pair were often in competition over far-flung colonies. Since 1945, the biggest single irritant has been contrasting attitudes to the United States, with Britain eagerly cultivating its special American friendship, and France striking a pose, at least, of championing European independence. In recent months, Donald Trump’s behavior has removed that problem; like teenagers abandoned by a once-generous parent, officials in London and Paris are now united in their horror at possibly having to guard Europe’s peace without an American guarantee. 

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How, then, could France and Britain — and in particular their militaries — learn to understand each other better? Perhaps the first thing French and British defense chiefs might do is have a hard look at the most recent occasion when their forces found themselves side-by-side in the heart of a bloody European war. That was not in 1944 or in 1914 — but in the Bosnian conflict of 1992-95. The need for a solemn exercise in self-examination is particularly acute on this day, the 30th anniversary of the most horrific act of mass slaughter perpetrated on European soil since the war against Hitler. The massacre of 8,000 or more Muslim men and boys from the enclave of Srebrenica began on 11 July 1995 and unfolded over the following four of five days. This orgy of killing by Bosnian Serb forces has been recognized judicially as an act of genocide. It also marked the end — morally and strategically — of a UN peacekeeping effort of which Britain and France were the joint leaders. 

There are complacent and self-congratulatory stories that British and French officials, along with American counterparts, can tell one another about Srebrenica and its aftermath. They go something like this. Shocked and surprised by the brutal actions of the Bosnian Serbs, the leaders of all Western countries concluded that it was time for an abrupt change of policy. Instead of pig-in-the-middle peacekeeping, the powers involved in Bosnia should wage a short, sharp war against the Serb forces which (apart from their misdeeds in Srebrenica) had occupied and ethnically cleansed two-thirds of Bosnia and were keeping its capital, Sarajevo, in a cruel stranglehold. This duly happened; the multinational contingent in the war zone, led by the British and French, reconfigured itself as a rapid reaction force which turned its guns on Serb positions in Sarajevo and elsewhere, while Nato (led by American bombers, but with plenty of help from the British, French and other Europeans) strafed Serb military assets from the air. There was an upsurge of fighting and battle-lines were redrawn — with the result that the Serb-controlled share of Bosnian territory was cut to barely half, and a realistic basis existed for a peace settlement which Nato’s forces could police. All that unfolded over the final months of 1995 until the Bosnians found themselves under international tutelage and at peace; people in Sarajevo could go about their lives without fear of snipers or shells. 

This happy version of the Srebrenica story — stressing what happened afterwards, not what went before — will be rehearsed in Western countries today — especially in Britain which has stood out in its determination to have the massacre remembered and recognized as genocide.

Yet, even 30 years on, there are pressing questions about what led up to the Srebrenica massacre — questions for all the countries that were involved in Bosnia over the preceding three years, Britain and France in particular. If there is one country which has taken a hard look at its responsibilities in Srebrenica, it is the Netherlands, whose lightly armed contingent of less than 400 blue-helmets were tasked with protecting the enclave and manifestly failed. Judicial proceedings and government-sponsored investigations have pored over every detail of the Dutch contingent’s activities, and its failure to understand, in time, that the Serb forces were bent not only on seizing the enclave but on slaughtering its male population.

But excessive preoccupation with the Dutch responsibility only serves to obscure the role played by more powerful countries — above all, America, Britain and France. It is a story whose origins predate the massacre by more than two years. In March 1993, it was a French general and UN commander, Philippe Morillon, who took a personal initiative and promised the 40,000 people, mostly Muslim, who were holed up in Srebrenica that they would be safe from the Serb forces which dominated the surrounding territory. “You are now under the protection of the UN forces… I will never abandon you,” he declared, in one of the war’s most famous sound-bites.

Dutch officials insist that they accepted responsibility for guarding the enclave after receiving an absolute guarantee from the United Nations that in the event of a major Serb attack, air power would be called in to stem the advance. On 10 July 1995, Dutch commanders did call in air power — even though its use might have cost the lives of their soldiers who were being held as hostages. After a complex and still-murky set of international deliberations, it was decided not to use air power. Who exercised that veto is still not clear, but an important place in the decision-making chain was held by General Bernard Janvier, a Frenchman who was commander of UN forces in the region.

Over the preceding months, tension had been building between General Janvier and Britain’s General Rupert Smith, who had taken command of UN forces in Bosnia. Janvier generally hewed to the cautious, peace-keeping line which had been common currency between Britain and France as of the previous year. But Smith came to the view that the UN contingent’s mission of guarding a ceasefire line was untenable and destined to fail; Western forces, if they had any role to play at all, should go onto a war footing and be prepared to confront the Serbs.

One of the reasons why Smith was so convinced that war, rather than sputtering peace, lay ahead was that the Serbs themselves were telling him so. Their commander Ratko Mladic — later convicted of genocide in Srebrenica — had made clear his determination to overrun the UN-protected enclaves; in particular Srebrenica, where local Bosnian fighters were — so he grumbled — taking advantage of UN protection to make hit-and-run attacks on the surrounding Serbs.

As events in late May 1995 would demonstrate, both Janvier and Smith were right in their different ways. Janvier was right to say that the blue-helmets could not change their military posture (from peacekeeping to war) without putting themselves in deadly danger. Smith was right to see that renewed war was probably coming anyway. He called in air strikes against the Serbs to punish some egregious acts of misbehavior; the Serbs retaliated by taking hundreds of UN peacekeepers hostage and sharing pictures of them shackled to posts. The clear message was: bomb us any more, and your peacekeepers will be killed.

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What happened then is still a shady business. The documentary evidence suggests that the Americans, British and French cut an informal agreement to “pause” air strikes in return for the release of the hostages. American officials leaked to the press that General Janvier had played a leading role in parleying with Ratko Mladic and assuring him that air strikes would cease. Whoever gave those assurances, the three leading powers in Bosnia were clearly co-responsible for them; the one party which was not informed was the Dutch, who were still in the hapless role of defending an indefensible haven for tens of thousands of human beings. That bargain, whatever its precise terms, paved the way for the Srebrenica tragedy.

Questions about the Srebrenica massacre fall into at least three categories. Was it generally known that the Serbs were planning an attack on the eastern enclaves which were under notional UN protection — and were the Serbs given some encouragement to think such an attack could proceed with impunity? Second, could more have been done to stop the Serb advance immediately after its forces crossed the boundary of the enclave on 6 July? Thirdly, during the crucial days of 11-15 July, when the Serb forces machine-gunned almost all the men and boys under their control, could something have been done, even at that late stage, to interrupt the massacre? It is fair to assume that the two countries which were best informed, in real time, about what was happening were the United States and Britain — given the former’s uniquely powerful satellite and human intelligence and Britain’s privileged access to that information. So it might be said that France bears a particular responsibility because of Janvier’s doveish line; while Britain faces hard questions about what it knew and when.

Hundreds of documents relating to the Srebrenica massacre have been released, but many remain classified. Some of those documents — especially pertaining to the question of when exactly full details of the horror emerged — are to be found in very secret places in London and Paris, as well as Washington DC.

It would have been rude to raise this matter at a glittering banquet in Windsor Castle, but as part of their general rapprochement, shouldn’t British and French officials be making a renewed effort to understand why their cooperation in Bosnia initially went rather well — and then failed so tragically?

Yesterday, in the final hours of Macron’s visit, he and Starmer held a video conference at a British military base with other possible participants in a “coalition of the willing”, led by Britain and France, whose job would be to shore up a Ukrainian ceasefire. London and Paris have been talking about this project since last November, and they believe at least 30 countries could take part. But in a throwback to the Franco-British force in Bosnia, there are many unanswered questions about the new mission’s exact mission and rules of engagement. As of now, its very existence is hypothetical. Whatever happens, the French and British commanders will, in the end, be answerable to their national capitals, not to any multinational structure. Huge potential exists for tragic misunderstanding. That’s why a refresher course in Balkan history is well overdue.

To tell the tale of how a modern, multinational European country could slide from normalcy into the terrible vortex of civil war, the drama drew on the personal experience of BBC correspondents during the Balkan Wars of the Nineties. Broadcast in 2019, at the height of the Brexit crisis, when the atmosphere in the UK was indeed that of a cold civil war, the BBC dramatists succeeded in showing not only how little they understood Brexit but also how little their correspondents had learned about the collapse of Yugoslavia and the ensuing Balkan Wars.

The history of Yugoslavia still provides fodder for fictional accounts of a second British civil war because it offers a convenient moral fable. There is the dangerous allure of nationalism, the pernicious role of charismatic demagogues, and the collapse of multicultural harmony. It is the smug conceit of a liberal West that thought it had escaped history through globalisation and European integration across the Nineties. But now that the story of both Britain’s national decline and Yugoslavia’s collapse looks very different, what — if anything — can the 21st-century British public learn from the collapse of Yugoslavia?

Unsurprisingly, the standard fable bears little correspondence to the historic reality of Yugoslavia’s collapse. While the nationalist passions created during the war were real enough, they were modern rather than deeply historical and were weaponised by the hackish nationalist leaders. More scheming bureaucrat than inspired orator, Serbian strongman Slobodan Milošević dredged up Serbia’s defeat in the 1389 Battle of Kosovo Polje to reignite Serbian nationalism 600 years later. Seen as the point at which the Serbs martyred themselves before the invading Turks, that tale of rekindled historic grievance was clearly insufficient as an explanation of national collapse. If an independent Scotland ever did go to war against a Rump England, we can be confident that The New York Times would soon be carrying sombre stories about Edward Longshanks and Robert the Bruce, accompanied by chin-stroking editorials about ancient rivalries stretching back to the 1314 Battle of Bannockburn, adorned with quotes from Mel Gibson. But it would not serve as a useful explanation.

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The reality is always more prosaic. Yugoslav ethnic grievances were bound up with centrifugal political dynamics between core and periphery. In 1974, the Yugoslav communist leader Marshal Tito sought to dilute Serbia’s preponderance as the largest constituent republic of the Yugoslav federation by imposing devolved provincial administrations within Serbia itself. This inter-ethnic asymmetry would play out in the collapse of Yugoslavia across the Nineties, as the secession of the smaller republics of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina were all afforded international recognition, while the secession of minority Serbs within Croatia and Bosnia was denied. To this day, the EU protectorate over Bosnia-Herzegovina expends much of its political energy in keeping Bosnia’s Serb population bound up in that rickety mini-federation, despite the Serbs’ hostility to the central state in Sarajevo.

Thus there is a lesson in Tito’s efforts at constitutional rebalancing. The attempt to boost peripheral smaller nations at the expense of the largest constituent nation risks precipitating a vicious cycle. The rights extended to smaller nations in order to placate and bind them more tightly to the central state can never be extended to the largest nation without disproportionately strengthening it, thereby risking the integrity of the central state. At the same time, the failure to extend the same rights equally across the constituent peoples of the state undermines the reciprocity and equality that is supposed to bind the state together.

We see this dynamic at play in the toing and froing over English representation in the union. Should we establish an English parliament? And what about the constitutional anomaly of the so-called West Lothian question, whereby Scottish and Welsh MPs have a right to legislate on English matters while English MPs do not with respect to Wales and Scotland? Devolution is indeed a nationalist cause, but, unlike in the narrative of First World Problems, not one of a “greater England”. It is the cause of Scottish and Welsh separatism, propped up by English metropolitan liberals who nurture Celtic separatism as a way of checking the despised voters of the English heartland outside of London.

In the Yugoslav situation, there was a critical catalyst which contributed to the process of decentralisation. According to Croatian political scientist Dejan Jović, the Yugoslav Communists’ political commitment to the Marxist “withering away of the state” propelled Yugoslav decentralisation further than mere administrative reforms. It was the Yugoslav federal state that bore the brunt of this forced degeneration, while leaving the constituent republics of the federation intact. Whatever the whining of former prime minister Liz Truss about socialist Britain, there is no Communist Party seeking to shrivel the British state. But there has been a parallel process of state shrivelling in Britain — which ironically was part of the very same neoliberal programme that Truss herself strove to revive.

The neoliberalism espoused by successive Tory leaders from Thatcher through to David Cameron’s tinpot version with the “big society” programme shares with Marxism a commitment to the vanishing state. The difference lies in the timing, function and ultimate end-state. Unlike the Marxian vision, in which under socialism the state is gradually absorbed by civil society itself, the neoliberal version seeks to defeat socialism by stripping back public power, especially state oversight of the national economy. This is done not by working-class revolution, but via state-led privatisation of state-owned industry, integration into the supranational EU, and the devolution of state authority to independent regulatory agencies such as an independent Bank of England or Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR). In the neoliberal vision, this shrunken state remains in place to enforce social order — and private property.

In practice, the neoliberals never succeeded in repressing state spending as a proportion of GDP. They did, however, succeed in gouging state capacity and stripping back public authority far beyond their original intent. We can see the results of the neoliberal effort to wither away the British state all around us: in the closure of national industries, dingy high streets with boarded-up shops, pot-holed roads, a crumbling public health service, the disgorging of convicts from prison, and police forces incapable of policing. Instead of a vigorous civil society emerging to supplant the central state, the neoliberal decimation of the state only weakened civil society further — look at how George Osborne’s programme of austerity cascaded state failure across the nation as a whole. Today, a central state still strives to divest itself of its sovereign power. As Rachel Reeves empowers the OBR, Keir Starmer’s localist agenda intends to drive devolution further, all while sidling up to the EU and Nato, the better to outsource Britain’s foreign and defence policies.

Despite enduring a parallel process of state degeneration, Britain enjoys a geopolitical advantage that Yugoslavia did not. As a Nonaligned power perched between East and West, Yugoslavia was left exposed to geopolitical realignment with the end of the Cold War in 1992, and in particular to the hubris of a newly reunified Germany. Chancellor Helmut Kohl decided he would signal Germany’s return as a great power by flouting US Secretary of State James Baker’s instruction that no one was to recognise any of the break-away Yugoslav republics. Germany’s recognition of Slovenian and Croatian independence in 1991 lit the kindling that would send Yugoslavia up in flames. In the end, Yugoslavia burned for nothing as Kohl’s bid for European leadership floundered. The US re-established hegemony over its European allies by leading the Nato bombing campaigns first against the Bosnian Serbs in the Nineties, and then Serbia itself in 1999. Today, Germany lets its own energy infrastructure be bombed.

Here Britain is fortunate. It was our withdrawal from the EU in 2020 that has allowed us to swerve the dystopian scenario of a future civil war. By enforcing the principle of loser’s consent on those who wanted to rejoin the EU, and by undercutting the appeal of Scottish separatism, our withdrawal from the EU preserved the authority of the central British state and, with it, British democracy. If we are to make good on this historic fortune, then we must reverse the process that led us here by an energetic programme of centralised nation-building that will necessarily involve strengthening the state. This does not mean strengthening the state’s already bloated bureaucracy, but rather boosting the state as an authoritative and representative public power. If we can do this, not only can we reap the political blessings of independence, but we might also be spared any more BBC fables about the former Yugoslavia.

At one such rally in the capital, attendees are sceptical. “Politicians here are greedy for money, but they’re also seeking to play a role in between the EU, Russia and China”, says Anna Mirkovic, 30. “The foreign powers only care about what they can extract from Serbia — it’s lithium today, but they also want access to the land, to cheap labour, without any protections. It’s disgusting.”

There’s a similar mood in Gornje Nedeljice, a village in the heart of the Jadar region in western Serbia set to be displaced by the planned mine. The town is home to the mineral Jadarite, the only such place in the world it exists. The mineral deposits are so rich in lithium that they’re mooted to meet 90% of the EU’s current needs — reducing reliance on Chinese lithium. The village has been the focal point of protest for years, with the government initially revoking Rio Tinto’s licence in 2022 following a wave of mass protests. Signs by the roadside read “no to mining — yes to life”, and the green hillsides and laden cornfields remain unbroken by heavy equipment.

But the EU is hungry for lithium. Rio Tinto continued buying up land and, following intense diplomatic pressure, the government has reissued the licence — in what critics view as a quid pro quo allowing the nation to purchase closer access to the EU at the cost of its natural resources. Almost all the houses on the village’s upper ridge have been snapped up and now stand empty, earmarked for destruction with signs reading: “DANGEROUS BUILDING, DO NOT ENTER” — a startling sight in a country not normally known for its strict adherence to planning codes. In the graveyard of an orthodox chapel beside the abandoned houses, I meet Darko, 55, who was born and raised in the village. “I don’t know what our ancestors would say, if they were alive to see this,” he says. “They’d suffer with every bit of land that was sold”.

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To Darko, the region’s cultural history, — where national hero Vuk Karadzic, the founder of the Serbian language, was born — agricultural richness and water table fed by the nearby Drina river are all reasons the EU should look elsewhere to meet its energy needs. On the main road below the abandoned village, I meet three generations of a local family sitting outside their business. They offer me a glass of spring water and locally-grown figs as physical evidence of their region’s natural wealth. “It’s like a horror movie up there at night, with everything empty”, says granddaughter Bojana, 22. “We have land in the village, too, but it’s not for sale.”

But most people have sold up after being offered handsome remuneration by Rio Tinto agents, with mostly ageing villagers scaling-up to three-bedroom city apartments. After Darko leaves the graveyard, I’m approached by two young men who had previously declined to speak with me, but now identify themselves as Rio Tinto employees. They still don’t want to give an interview, but are keen to know what I’m doing in the village, and praise Rio Tinto as “the best thing that’s happened to this region. They employ 300 people already, and it will be more”. This is the government’s case — that the mine will add a claimed sum of between €10bn and €12bn to Serbia’s ailing economy. But so far, locals aren’t buying it.

The government led by Aleksandar Vučić regularly faces protests from the liberal middle classes in Belgrade, angry at perceived autocracy, media restrictions, corruption and lack of employment opportunities. Typically, the opposition calls for the liberalisation of society and a move toward the EU. But as the current pressure from Brussels suggests, the EU has long been happy to support Vučić and other regional strongmen in order to suit its own economic interests.

That’s why the Belgrade rally sees young liberals and socialists rubbing shoulders with older Serbians like Hajo, 70, holding aloft a Russian flag inscribed with the legend “you’re far from home” — a message to Brussels and the universally vilified German chancellor Scholz. “The biggest problem is not bad government, but lack of sovereignty and domination by Western interests”, he says. 

At the opposite end of the political spectrum, Milan Mladenovic, 20, has attended the Belgrade rally carrying the flag of the communist Yugoslav federation. His motivation is simple: “Back then, workers had rights, and businesses weren’t privatised.” Some older demonstrators ask for photos with the flag, a reminder of an era when Serbia and the rest of the former Yugoslavia enjoyed strong economic performance, a relatively high standard of living and outsized diplomatic influence. But younger, more pro-government and nationalist protesters spit on the flag and shout abuse.

Like many young Belgrade residents, Milan says he sees the potential benefit a pivot toward Brussels could bring: “The EU funds schools and hospitals, whereas Russia gives us MiG warplanes: you see the difference. If we were in the EU, we’d have regulations, democracy and workers rights.” But Serbia is not likely to be allowed into that club any time soon, meaning the EU will continue to view the country as “a free market, a back door, open for cheap labour”.

Theoretically, the lithium resources could boost the local economy and meet an urgent, growing global need. But locals are uniformly wary of government complicity with exploitative foreign powers, characterising the plans as neo-imperialist exploitation. “Did they build any lithium mines in Germany? In Portugal? No, they built it here,” Darko says. But to the leaders of each country, the move is mutually beneficial. Germany can export its dirty business to a country with no realistic prospects of EU accession and Vučić can enjoy their support in another round of dodgy elections. 

The government is particularly concerned by the latest protests, characterising them as a part of a coup organised by Russia. Dozens of people have been arrested for organising protests against the mine, as well as receiving anonymous death threats, while journalists covering the demonstrations have been pilloried by politicians.

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This is likely due to the bipartisan nature of a cause which can unite even the government’s normal pro-Russian, conservative constituency with Belgrade liberals. A government long accustomed to bolstering support through nationalist rhetoric may find its support dwindling by protesters angered over the perceived sale of Serbian resources to benefit European and regional elites. Many protesters carry signs reading “Rio Tinto, March from the Drina” — a reference to a song and film commemorating Serbia’s unexpected First World War defeat of Austria-Hungary, in the first victory for the Allied Powers. It’s a reminder of the potential for nationalist opposition to the lithium scheme.

But most locals fatalistically agree the mine is a done deal. “Germany, Brussels: these are powerful forces. Vučić only continues what they put in motion”, Darko says. Bojana agrees, calling the decision to re-open the mine a “force majeure” imposition which can’t be withstood by domestic politicians or regional protests.

Rather, the Western Balkans will remain what Milan calls the “back door” of Europe, a dumping-ground for toxic industry which Germany and Brussels and other powers can burden with their needs in exchange for cheap concessions. A Chinese-run mine in Eastern Serbia is already displacing villages and deforesting hillsides to fuel a growing need for copper, also vital in green technology: in neighbouring Bosnia, the 2023 discovery of lithium ore looks set to fuel a similar scramble for profits. As EU politicians trumpet their squeaky-clean green credentials, this half-forgotten corner of Europe looks set to pay the cost.

To back up this claim, liberals cite polls which invariably give countries under the US security umbrella disproportionate representation, and which seem to confirm that the rest of the world shares their view. But as anyone who has lived or travelled extensively outside of the West in recent years will tell you, the reality on the ground is much more complex. Trump’s base extends far beyond the United States.

Trump’s allies abroad take many forms, with motivations ranging from an ideological affinity for Right-wing anti-communism to a preference for a limited “America First” policy over the Democrats’ liberal internationalism. When liberals encounter these positions, they tend to label Trump’s foreign admirers as authoritarian. There may be some truth to this: Trump’s populist tough-guy persona is something that people in many parts of the world like, perhaps because it’s familiar. But such linear explanations are also self-serving, and neither entirely accurate nor honest.

The reality is that Trump’s overseas approval can be found in unlikely places. For instance, according to polls from the 2020 election, the country where Trump was most perceived to care about “ordinary people” was Nigeria. In that year, to the incredulity of American reporters, hundreds of Nigerians held a rally for the former president, clad in t-shirts showing his face and waving placards calling for his re-election. At the time, one 23-year-old artist told Reuters that Nigerians appreciated Trump’s “radical” approach to politics. Some liked him so much, in fact, that they weren’t that concerned with the Muslim ban. “If we have a person like Trump… Nigeria will be a better place to stay,” another supporter said. “There will be no need to go outside the country.”

Some attribute Trump’s popularity in Africa to the continent’s Christian minority, and the perception that Trump is the defender of Christians and their interests. He is, for example, a perennial favourite of African preachers and prophets — and none more so than Uebert Angel, a Pentecostal minister from Zimbabwe and an ambassador for the African Union’s Pan-African Parliament. In a recent broadcast, Angel — who has three million Instagram followers and over half a million YouTube subscribers —explored Trump’s “spiritual alignment”. “Donald means the ruler,” Angel explained. And “John, for J, means ‘the voice’”. Angel believes that prayers transmitted by his enormous following saved Trump from that fateful bullet in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Nigerian televangelist Christian Oyakhilome, known as “Pastor Chris”, has also openly backed Trump. As the founder of the megachurch Christ Embassy, which has spread internationally, he alleges that Trump has been targeted for advocating for his flock. “They are angry at Trump for supporting Christians,” Oyakhilome has said. “So the real ones they hate are you who are Christians.”

Elsewhere, some in Africa explicitly support Trump’s dismissive approach to the continent, including his insistence on cutting aid. “For some strange reason, while I despise his divisive rhetoric and certainly don’t think he’s the best choice for President of the United States, I agree with Mr Trump’s position on Africa,” business strategy specialist John-Paul Iwuoha wrote in 2016. “Africa needs to wean itself off the tranquilising milk of foreign aid… and thanks to Mr Trump’s nationalistic ideals, Africa now has a rare opportunity to stand on its own and create a bright and prosperous future for itself.”

This aversion to aid is largely a response to its politicised and transactional nature. On one recent pan-Africanist podcast discussion about Trump and Kamala Harris’s hypothetical Africa policies, the hosts agreed that Harris would step up engagement and aid for Africa, while Trump would likely scale it back. But as they saw it, the Democrats’ supposed generosity with aid is an underhanded tool of manipulation — a means of buying the support of corrupt African leaders and ensuring continued allegiance to the US.

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Further afield, Trump seems to be just as popular in Vietnam, where scooter businesses bear his name and the wall of a Domino’s Pizza restaurant displays a picture of him on The Apprentice. Binh Lee, an entrepreneur in Ho Chi Minh City, has written that Vietnam’s “love affair” with Trump can be explained in part by his nationalism. In the West, nationalism is often associated with ethnic cleansing and genocide. But in Vietnam, as in much of the so-called Global South, nationalism served as the ideological basis for decolonisation. While many rightly emphasise the sharp distinction between these two contexts, some in Vietnam do not. As Lee explained: “With his slogan ‘Make America Great Again’, Donald Trump… embodied the kind of ideal leader forever ingrained in our collective psyche: the hero who would appear at the darkest moment of his country and lead his people through the struggle to ultimate triumph.” Meanwhile, others link Trump’s appeal to Vietnam’s fast-growing economy, where new would-be entrepreneurs view the former president as the embodiment of capitalist success. Others still attribute Trump’s popularity to his anti-China sentiments, which some in Vietnam share.

In Indonesia, meanwhile, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, attitudes about Trump are also unexpectedly mixed. While some leaders lambasted him for his bellicose rhetoric, others were more circumspect. One prominent lawmaker dismissed Trump’s Indonesian critics, stressing that the president had only adopted anti-Muslim rhetoric to drum up support among the electorate, while another minister described Trump as a “non-ideological and non-confrontational” leader who would treat Indonesia as a “democratic equal”. In a similar vein, researcher Andrew Matong has noted that Trump’s presidency was conspicuously free of the American flag burnings across the Muslim world that were ubiquitous in the time of George W. Bush. Many of these countries’ citizens may find Trump’s language repugnant and dislike his policies, but for many, these pale in comparison to the wholesale destruction of countries overseen by “respectable” Republicans and Democrats.

Similarly, few foreign countries celebrated Trump’s 2016 victory more than Serbia, where Bill Clinton is still despised as the leader who spearheaded the bombing of then-Yugoslavia in 1999. Trump has appeared on billboards there, and you can buy socks emblazoned with his face on Belgrade’s central streets. More recently, the current Right-wing Serbian government has made little secret of its preference for another Trump presidency. Indeed, it has already signed an agreement with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to develop a complex on the site of the old Yugoslav Army headquarters, which was bombed by Nato in 1999. The planned development will reportedly include a controversial memorial complex “dedicated to all the victims of Nato aggression”.

Yet perhaps the most surprising locus for Trump approval is China. Within hours of the assassination attempt, Chinese vendors had printed t-shirts depicting the image of a bloodied, defiant Trump with the slogans “fight, fight, fight” and “shooting makes me stronger”. One vendor on the Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao claimed he had received 2,000 orders within three hours of putting the t-shirts online.

No doubt many of Trump’s Chinese supporters find him appealing because he shares their distaste for platitudinous liberalism. On a more elite level, however, there is some muted hope that another Trump presidency might be “realistic and balanced”. This is an echo of the Seventies’ logic that “only Nixon could go to China” — the implication being that only an anti-communist hawk could oversee US-China rapprochement, because the same move by a centre-left Democrat would have been tarred as “soft on China”.

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In many instances, then, Trump’s foreign support is motivated by his businessman credentials: he is viewed as someone who prefers making deals to launching secular crusades in the name of democracy and human rights. At the negotiating table, we can surmise, such a distinction matters. While liberal internationalism is sustained by faith, deal-making implies a certain crass rationality.

Indeed, this line of thinking was even evident in a recent interview with Mohammed Al-Hindi, a top leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who was asked whether Biden or Trump would be better for Palestine. (The interview was carried out prior to Biden stepping down as the 2024 nominee.) While noting that “Trump, at the end of the day, just like Biden, would be looking after American interests”, Al-Hindi seemed to suggest that Trump might be slightly preferable. “We kind of miss Trump now, his debates and statements,” he explained. After observing that the current war in Gaza had affected Israel’s standing “in the eyes of the world and the region”, he concluded that “any future president will find those changes on the table and they cannot be disregarded — especially if he is a businessman like Trump”.

Thus, a more complicated picture of US foreign policy emerges from beyond the West. Democrats like to say that the world’s dictators will be happy if Trump comes to power, because he will put an end to Washington’s promotion of “democracy” abroad. But plenty of people who’ve endured such policies do not view their outcomes in the same self-mythologising terms. In fact, many see them as disastrous. The result is something less flattering for both sides of the US political divide: while some of Trump’s overseas defenders like him for what he is, many more like him for what he is not.

This is ex-Yu music, suffused with nostalgia for a lost era of multi-ethnic unity and relative prosperity under Yugoslavia’s red socialist star. Remixers, archivists and DJs such as Kluboslavija, Peđa Radović and Fox & Recht collect millions of views on YouTube, and sell out throughout the now-divided region, from nightclubs in Croatian tourist hotspots to former communist cultural centres in sleepy border towns. Passionate, multi-ethnic crowds — young and old, Left-wing, Right-wing, and cynically disaffected — regularly turn out from Sarajevo to Split to celebrate this shared heritage.

Many party-goers simply love the music in the same, straightforward nostalgic spirit as Westerners love Abba or Queen. But often, the mood is explicitly political, with fans lamenting “the land of freedom and self-governance”, and artists making heavy use of kitsch socialist imagery. I attended one of the more intimate shows at Yugoland, a small camping-site-cum-theme-park in northern Serbia, established the day the third and final iteration of Yugoslavia was formally dissolved in 2003. Yugoland was built on a vacant lot by an uncle unable to bear the break-up of the socialist federation, and laid out to resemble its original borders. (A swimming pool marks the Croatian coast; Montenegro gets the parking lot.)

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“We’re not here for nostalgia,” insists middle-aged party-goer Boris as he sips his fiery fruit brandy below a street sign emblazoned with the name of a communist anti-Nazi partisan, “Because we never stopped — we listen to this music every day. It reminds us of unity, of having a country on a level with other countries.”

Boris’s protestations notwithstanding, the ex-Yu music undeniably rides the crest of a broader wave of what’s called Yugonostalgia, a political and cultural yearning for the better quality of life, inter-ethnic tolerance and unity which marked the socialist era in the Western Balkans along with regret for the Nineties wars which engulfed the region. It’s far from a fringe phenomenon. A remarkable 81% of people in Serbia and 77% in multicultural Bosnia regret the collapse of Tito’s federation — though the figures are lower in pro-Western Slovenia and Kosovo. Restaurants bedecked in kitsch communist memorabilia are as common as populist politicians laying dubious claim to the socialist heritage.

“You had three religions, six different republics, Roman, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian culture,” recalls ex-Yu DJ Dušan, one half of the Yugoton project, a duo creating some of the scene’s most popular music. “My father told me, why would you need to leave? You had everything here.”

Uniquely in Europe, Tito’s partisans were able to kick out the Nazis, establish their own state, and resist co-option by either Stalin or the Western powers — thanks to canny statesmanship, they were able to place Yugoslavia at the head of a “Non-Aligned Movement”, encompassing over half the world’s population. Thereafter, a mixed economy and Marshall Plan aid combined with socialist protections and an anti-Stalinist political culture to guarantee a generally high standard of living.

Craftily playing Washington against Moscow while remaining independent from both, Yugoslavia enjoyed outsized diplomatic importance. As the two blocs both courted Yugoslavia, ordinary locals could travel freely to both East and West, using one of the world’s most powerful passports — a fact which would rapidly change in the Nineties, when the country descended into war and its passport became as useless as its rapidly devalued currency. (The Yugoland theme-park now issues its own novelty passports, claiming over 9,000 “citizens”).

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Tito’s regime had guaranteed inter-ethnic cooperation on the basis of common prosperity, but as economic crisis worsened, foreign powers colluded with cynical local politicians to exploit nationalist grievances. Those wars were soundtracked by the emergent genre of turbofolk: an eclectic form of music, pivoting wildly between accordion and eurodance beats, while eulogising the warlords and gangsters who profited from the violence. Songs from the “Cocktail of Patriotic Hits” compilation show minarets under tank fire, paramilitaries and Nato bombing, while threatening the end of the region’s Muslim population. Turbofolk heroine Ceca was even married to infamous indicted war criminal Željko ‘Arkan’ Ražnatović, a bank robber and football hooligan who led his “Tigers” paramilitary group in their slaughter of scores of civilians.

But it’s now two decades since the hostilities ended. The region has been left in limbo, as America, Brussels and Russia prop up various successor regimes that are frequently denied any real hope of accession to the EU. “Now we have different flags, different borders, different anthems — but what else is different? Nothing,” laments Dušan. “Now we say I’m Serbian, I’m Croatian, I’m Bosnian — but are you happier? Are you living better? The salaries are hardly any different, and young people from everywhere are leaving, going to Germany for work.”

The much maligned turbofolk still plays in Belgrade clubs, including some from which the US has banned its embassy personnel over concerns of anti-American violence. But overtly militaristic themes are now rather less common than straightforward celebrations of wealth, sex, and gangster success: it’s a latter-day spirit of capitalist nihilism tinged with camp, Eurovision-style provocation. It has even been argued that turbofolk itself provides a platform for “cultural reconciliation” between young people from the different Balkan nations, particularly in the diaspora, where ethnic differences can blur and be forgotten in the name of a common, defiant Balkan spirit.

And indeed, the atmosphere at the Belgrade ex-Yu party isn’t wholly dissimilar to the vibe in popular mainstream clubs. Drinks here are four times the price in Yugoland, and the affluent, well-dressed crowd includes young Serbs who have travelled back from Germany, Canada and Australia to visit their homeland. Some older revellers pour scorn on the “trash turbofolk” being played elsewhere, and suggest even this crowd is too busy updating their Instagram stories to enjoy the atmosphere. “This music is older than we are,” cries one delighted, topless young man. “It’s what my parents played!”

There is no equivalent broad, nostalgic cultural movement in the countries of the former USSR or Warsaw Pact. But here, young people frustrated with contemporary regional politics can find common cause with ageing communists on the dancefloor.

“People who come to our parties are aged 18 to 70s, grannies and granddaughters,” says Dušan. He recalls playing a show near Vukovar, a small Croatian village lying beside the Serbian border, where ethnic Croats from a community which suffered severe violence during the Nineties nonetheless chanted “let’s go, Belgrade” in a message of tolerance to the Serbian DJs. “Especially in Bosnia and Sarajevo, people say Tito’s time was the best,” says the DJ, referring to the cosmopolitan “little Yugoslavia” which suffered the worst ethnic violence in the Nineties. “They are mostly Muslims, but they treat us like brothers. The music connects us.”

It’s no coincidence that the Yugoton Project’s most loved remix is the theme to a late Eighties Yugoslav soap opera called “Better life”. By the time the sitcom reached screens, the collapse of Yugoslavia was already an inevitability. Now, even the most Yugo-nostalgic locals admit there is no likelihood of a renewed federation emerging any time soon. But as Dušan says, “the song speaks about wanting a better life, and every one of us wants that — something better, to move on.”

As the boats moored by the floating nightclub pull away and drift downstream, the families aboard flash the nationalist a three-fingered Serbian salute. And you wonder what the communist guerilla-turned-statesman Tito, glowering down from the DJ’s t-shirts, would make of the contemporary Belgrade nightclub scene.

Given the Nato campaign was justified by the need to halt what was described as a Serbian “genocide” against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, the circumstances surrounding the bombing, which left three Chinese journalists dead, remain murky. While Nato insists the attack was accidental, Beijing’s claim that it was deliberate was bolstered by a subsequent investigation in The Observer, which suggested the building was targeted by the US in order to foil Chinese intelligence-gathering efforts on American tactics and weaponry — allegations denied by Washington.

Yet if the circumstances of the bombing remain contested, the international consequences of Nato’s campaign against Serbia are clearer, as indeed is the difference between the China of 1999 and the China of today. There is, in short, no doubting the symbolism of Xi’s visit to the Balkan back-yard of the European Union.

A quarter of a century ago, although China was already the world’s second largest economy, measured by purchasing power parity (PPP) terms, its options for retaliation against the US bombing of its sovereign territory were limited. Today, not only is China the largest economy in the world — it is orders of magnitude more powerful in military terms, with significantly more means of exerting strategic, diplomatic and military pressure on the US and its allies, ranging across Africa to the South China Sea to the Taiwan Straits. On the site of the embassy now stands a new complex, incorporating a Confucius Institute as well as offices, workshops and a hotel. It is a symbol of China’s wealth and soft power as much as its world position. Perhaps even more significant than enhanced Chinese power, however, are the changes in the wider international order.

The Nato bombing over Kosovo was both the moment of peak liberal international hubris, and the moment the so-called “rules-based order” began to crumble. On the one hand, the campaign was justified by the need to defend the human rights of Kosovo’s majority Albanian population from a counter-insurgency campaign against Albanian separatists waged by Belgrade. On the other, the Nato bombing was also in explicit violation of the UN Charter, whose articles protected member-states’ sovereign rights to be free from external interference.

Unlike previous humanitarian military operations during the Nineties, in this case the circle was not squared by the UN granting authorisation for the Nato military intervention. The UN could not offer its imprimatur because of the threatened use of veto by Russia and China, permanent members on the UN Security Council. Both countries were suspicious of Western states’ growing proclivity to use force in defence of human rights, and both had good reason to want to discourage their own restive peripheral minorities from seeking outside military support.

Despite the lack of UN legitimacy, the pressure of the Nato bombing campaign, as well as behind-the-scenes Russian diplomacy, eventually forced the Serbian state to withdraw its forces from Kosovo, allowing Nato to occupy the province and establish an international protectorate in the territory, where NATO has remained ever since. Kosovo would eventually unilaterally declare independence from Serbia in 2008 — a claim to independence still denied by Belgrade. Serbia still enjoys the support of Russia and China in its efforts to stymie international recognition of Kosovo’s independence, while independent Kosovo now enjoys the recognition of most of the world’s states.

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The 1999 bombing campaign was, therefore, both a moment of Western triumph and Western overreach. Defended at the time in the most grandiloquent terms as a cosmic battle between good and evil, the Nato campaign showed the West at the peak of its power, able to intervene militarily wherever it wanted on humanitarian grounds, unrestrained by international law or convention and without UN support. But it also amounted to the sabotage by Western states of the very same rules-based order enshrined in the UN, whose liberal maxims — including non-intervention in internal matters — were extended as the guarantee for non-Western states to accept Western leadership. Although the civilian casualties cited by Western states to justify the bombing quickly began to unravel, the precedent had already been established.

After Kosovo, humanitarianism became fused with every Western war-effort — whether the need to defend Afghan women from the Taliban, Iraqis from Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, or Libyans from Colonel Gaddafi’s vengeance. From an international order based around sovereign states and citizens’ rights, Nato ushered in a cosmopolitan order based around global states on the one hand, whose political and legal claims have limitless jurisdiction, and a morass of deracinated humanity on the other, which no longer enjoyed any national protections except for the prospect of a humanitarian intervention in their favour.

Today, this humanitarianism is still regarded as the basis of the West’s global right — as seen in America’s efforts to build a “floating pier” to distribute humanitarian aid to besieged Palestinians in Gaza; in effect, the US is shoring up its legitimacy in the Gaza war by ministering to the Palestinians’ humanitarian needs in the midst of an Israeli bombardment by US-supplied arms. What has changed is more on the other side of the geopolitical divide. Across the Nineties and early 2000s, Russia championed the rights of sovereign states against the humanitarianism of Western states. Since the Russo-Georgian War of 2008, however, Vladimir Putin has deployed the Nato model to justify Russian expansionism. It begins with military intervention to defend embattled separatist minorities (Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Donbass) against genocidal central government forces (Tbilisi, Kyiv), followed by the establishment of protectorates (the former People’s Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk). The Kremlin twist to the Nato model is then to annex the protectorates.

Between Nato and Vladimir Putin, there is now no longer anyone in the international order today willing to defend the principle of non-intervention and state sovereignty. Two obvious European successors to claim the mantle of defending national sovereignty — Brexit Britain and embattled Ukraine — have both rejected pursuing a politics of national independence in favour of plumping for Nato, the single transnational organisation that has done the most to destroy not only individual states (Libya, Yugoslavia), but state sovereignty as such, which Nato expressly jettisoned in favour of fighting for the humanitarian responsibility to protect.

And what of Serbia? For all the diplomatic support it has received from Russia in its efforts to stymie Kosovo’s independence, Serbia’s international position is much closer to Ukraine’s than that of any other country in Europe. As with the Nato intervention, occupation and eventual dismemberment of Serbian territory with Kosovar independence, so Russia has done to Ukraine in Crimea and Donbass. If any two European countries have a joint interest in maintaining their sovereignty and territorial integrity from the predations of more powerful neighbours, it is Ukraine and Serbia.

This is partly why Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić has exported Serbian weapons to Ukraine, while also managing to avoid joining the EU sanctions on Russia that have blown back against Western economies. Here, Vučić is trying to perpetuate the diplomatic tradition of neutralism and non-alignment that Serbia inherited from the former Yugoslavia, which sought to balance between East and West during the Cold War.

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Yet while he is no less autocratic than the Yugoslav Communist leader Marshal Tito, Vučić nonetheless lacks Tito’s toughness. Not only did Tito allegedly threaten to assassinate Stalin when Yugoslavia broke with the USSR in 1948, but he also went on to establish an independent geopolitical bloc — the Non-Aligned Movement — alongside Indian independence leader Jawaharlal Nehru, Indonesian independence leader Sukarno and Egyptian nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser. By contrast, although Vučić assiduously courts outside patronage, he does not have the vision to establish an independent bloc, even though the circumstances for doing so are so much more propitious than in Tito’s day — one need only look at economic growth figures for India and Indonesia to see that. Nonetheless, even Vučić’s limited and unimaginative efforts to balance between Brussels, Moscow, Beijing and Washington D.C. indicate that there are more political options available for those canny enough to pursue them.

After all, long before Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, the international rules-based order was buried beneath the rubble of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. While Xi’s China may offer countries around the world more space to exercise political independence from the West, its transactional vision of international relations is no substitute for Western leadership, and its support for Russian revanchism indicates it does not have the vision to lead an international order of sovereign nation-states. Despite many vesting their hopes for liberation from American hegemony in a multipolarity, the truth is Xi’s Chinese nationalism offers no meaningful counter-pole to Nato. Rather, it demonstrates that until there is a state willing to pursue a robust sovereigntist politics of national independence, the international order will continue to be plagued by grandiloquent globalism — with all the strategic overreach and geopolitical rivalry that comes with it.

Theirs is a courageous, but ultimately hopeless, battle. The Bor complex in eastern Serbia holds 200 million tonnes of copper ore, making it one of the largest deposits of the metal in the world. And given its uses in smartphones, green energy technology and Chinese manufacturing, demand for the metal has exploded. Zijin, which swallowed up the formerly Serbian state-owned mine five years ago, recently posted the highest profits of any company operating in the country. It’s hardly going to retreat now.

Locals admit they’re employed by Zijin with a faint air of embarrassment, or palpable anger at the lack of alternatives. “We don’t like working for them,” says Milan, 31, who is employed by Zijin as a truck driver yet has turned out to support the protest. “As Michael Jackson said — they don’t care about us.”

“This way to the apocalypse,” another local says, pointing down a winding path that ends abruptly on a deforested hillside dotted with bilingual Serbian-Chinese warning signs. The path leads past an Orthodox church, which is padlocked since it’s backing the mining initiative. From the hill, you can smell the wet cement and see the vast drainage pipe which will soon drown the village. The landscape vanishes into a wasteland of ground rock, effluent and dust.

“There are explosions every day,” says Milan. “They’re putting the whole periodic table in the air!” The region has seen repeated protests over lead, arsenic and mercury poisoning, with sulphur dioxide levels 15 times over the legal limit. The mine itself is big enough to swallow 1,000 Serbian villages, and the pipes stemming from it are stuffed at the joints with dirty Styrofoam. The lunar landscape, meanwhile, bears no resemblance to scattered billboards depicting lush reforestation and boasting improbably of Zijin’s “green strategic objectives”. Instead, Bor is a textbook company town: Chinese middle-managers booze in hot-pot restaurants, while locals and imported Chinese workers labour side-by-side in warehouses and waste management plants.

At a public meeting attended by hundreds of villagers, mine workers and ecological activists from across Serbia, the 20 women who led the protest are given a hero’s welcome. Their message is defiant, but the mood fatalistic. Speakers compare the resource extraction to the “struggle against colonialism” in Congo. “We’re not against any industry or any nation in particular, but we are against a Chinese company coming here to exploit us,” one villager says.

Nonetheless, Krivelj’s evacuation looks like a done deal. Some villagers have been bought out, while others have been forced to leave homes already occupied and swallowed by the mine without a penny in compensation. Locals say they believe Zijin is playing a waiting game, making the village uninhabitable to force them out one by one. As such, the current protest is focused on securing a collective agreement ensuring locals receive an equal cash payment and relocation to a new site closer to the city, rather than being driven off their land as the value depreciates. “They will never close the mine. That’s not an option,” Milan says. “Relocation is the best option for us.”

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Looking around the village square, filled mostly with pensioners sipping beer or dozing off the after-effects of shared vats of goulash, it’s hard to escape the sense of a Hobbiton placed under terminal threat by encroaching industry. Jasna Tomić, a local council member who has led the protests dressed in a green blazer, says her main concern is maintaining the village’s communal spirit, even in the new, concrete company homes where they will end up if they secure their hoped-for relocation deal with Zijin.

“My family has been here for 170 years, living in that house on the square,” she says. “Our traditions have to continue, and we expect the state to realise the importance of this.” Like many locals, Tomić is a member of the Vlach minority, a shrinking shepherd people who wandered the mountains of the Balkans for centuries. But there is more at stake than tradition. Tomić says the Serbian state is absent from the negotiations, “protecting” Zijin while allowing the Chinese company to pressure individual villagers into abandoning their land without adequate compensation.

The problem is not just China’s relentless Belt and Road investment, which passes through the Balkans to Greece’s ancient port of Piraeus, and has been described by Xi Jinping as the “Dragon’s Head” of the global infrastructure project. In recent years, Serbia has also witnessed massive protests over mining operations planned by Rio Tinto (né Zinc), after the Anglo-Australian conglomerate discovered a new lithium-rich mineral bearing the name of its native Serbian river basin, which it planned to extract in order to satiate the European Union’s growing hunger for electric car batteries. (Meanwhile, the Balkans are becoming a graveyard for the EU’s discarded, polluting, second-hand vehicles.) The government was forced to cancel its Rio Tinto deal in a rare concession to public pressure, but the conglomerate keeps quietly buying up land in eastern Serbia, and Serbia’s government recently signed a new strategic partnership deal with the European Commission, promising access to those precious lithium reserves.

“The problem isn’t the Chinese themselves: it’s globalisation,” says Predrag, who like many locals spends months at a time working in the EU, returning home sporadically only to witness the loss of another excavated hillside. “If it wasn’t them, it would be Rio Tinto, or someone else. These companies are no different from one another.”

In neighbouring North Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, locals have similarly protested against new lithium and copper mines. But given the lack of any other employment opportunities, miners in the impoverished Western Balkans have also been fighting for better pay and working opportunities. In Kosovo, miners recently staged a hunger strike. And in Krivelj, villagers make it clear that they aren’t opposed to extracting natural resources per se — but rather, the steady drain of profits out of their country into the pockets of international conglomerates. “There is a choice,” Predrag insists. “You can be a good mine worker, do your job well: but you don’t have to be a slave.”

It’s hard to imagine a future settlement that balances local mining families’ need for work, the preservation of a fragile environment and culture, and a growing, global need for green energy resources. Given the circumstances, it’s little wonder fatalism abounds. Aleksandar “Ćuta” Jovanović, who rose to prominence as leader of the anti-Rio Tinto protests and is now an MP in Serbia’s Parliament, has come to Krivelj to lend his typically bombastic support. I tell him my native countryside near Birmingham endured similar industrialisation in the 19th century. “But there are still people living there, aren’t there?”, Ćuta responds. “In five years, all these people will be gone.”

It’s hard to disagree with his grim assessment. There’s no reason to believe the green revolution will improve the lives of these villagers, any more than its industrial forebear. With a national economy exposed to the depredations of private, foreign interests and a government unable or unwilling to protect its people and environment, Bor’s barren hillsides offer a glimpse at the future of Eastern Europe. Hay-carts alone will not stop the rapacious markets of both the East and West.

The idea of setting up an “independent” nation has always been attractive to libertarians, even though a half-century of attempts to establish tax-free idylls have produced no tangible results beyond angering locals and wasting the pocket change of billionaires like Peter Thiel. Partly in response to this, the more artistic tradition of “micronations” has been overtaken by a particular trend of Bitcoin-fuelled ultra-libertarianism, which implies less a release from state repression than a form of anarcho-capitalism. This vision has more in common with Dubai’s brand of free-market authoritarianism — a vision of ultra-rich luxury and labour exploitation — than any true utopian ideal.

Vit Jedlička, a ruddy-cheeked, stout-chested libertarian ideologue and self-styled President of Liberland, is as emphatic as he is energetic. “We are not a micronation, but a nation of 700,000 people, with embassies in 80 nations, and relations with countries like Haiti, Somaliland, and Malawi. We’re serious about getting Liberland set up as a country.” Never one to undersell his project, Jedlička clearly has tremendous fun barrelling around the world promoting Liberland. Nominally based out of this scrap of marshland the size of Gibraltar, but largely operating online, it’s a Web-3 nation: businesses unfettered from regulation, a skeleton state providing only basic protections, and “citizens” issued with voting credits based on the amount of voluntary tax paid.

Never mind that none of those would-be citizens actually live in Liberland — instead there is a handful of activists moored downstream on a houseboat, under the close supervision of the Croatian police. Never mind that its diplomacy is rather more limited than Jedlička suggests, with the citizens of Malawi recently ridiculing their government for getting involved with a nation that is never likely to exist. The President is always ready with a litany of soon-to-be realised projects and promises, hinting at deals and meetings with billionaires and politicians. The crash in the crypto market is a blip; a Liberland houseboat has been torched, but there will be an insurance payout. Every potential threat is recast as proof his project will succeed.

We first meet in a half-finished holiday camp Jedlička has purchased on the Serbian side of the river. And there is a clear tension between this “eco-village” (a “diaspora” site where Liberland’s first “settlers” will train in survival and negotiation skills) and his Serbian supporters’ frustration at the lack of a clear business plan. But, even if its “ambassadors” are paid lobbyists or random Bitcoin enthusiasts, Liberland does have more political reach than other libertarian micronations. This is partly a product of Jedlička’s gregarious personality, which has kept the project alive since it began in 2015. Due to an arcane, post-Yugoslavian boundary dispute, neither Serbia nor Croatia prefer to lay claim to the 7km²  of territory, leaving it — Jedlička says — “terra nullia” for the taking. (The Croatian authorities disagree, tolerating the Liberlanders’ presence on their territory, but denying them access to the contested patch of land.)

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But this reach is also thanks to the political moment into which Jedlička announced his project. The conservative Czech politician found a natural home in the heady world of Web-3 technologies, securing capital backing (through cryptocurrency investments) and the means to place Liberland’s constitution on the blockchain in perpetuity. He generated a growing, global interest in his ultra-libertarian vision — resulting in collaborations with big-name architects, the Polkadot cryptocurrency development fund, and a host of global Bitcoin fans, including the Liberian (not Liberlandian) Consul General to Dubai, currently living on a barge just outside the UAE in imitation of Liberland’s ideals.

For Jedlička, these international supporters “understand the economic potential of a truly free zone in the European Union… they like the vision, and want to watch”. He presents it as “combining aspects of the most successful states to date”, bringing together Singapore-style meritocracy, the town-hall democracy of early America, and the low-tax environment of European microstates such as Monaco or Liechtenstein.

In practice, such a system would face immediate issues. As we ride rickety bikes along the course of the Danube, Jedlička says he prefers the “right to set up a lemonade stand in the street over the right to cycle down it naked”, suggesting that the freedom to practice business should trump personal liberties. Yet this approach opens the door to all manner of abuses, since those individuals or businesses able to spend the most money will also be able to determine law and policy, by securing the most voting credits. Already, in Serbia’s Liberland-linked tourist village, a promised wage of €600 a month has proved insufficient to retain the skilled workers needed to complete the camp, leaving it half-finished. The “non-aggression principle” proposed to prevent direct physical harm between Liberland citizens offers no protection of basic rights. There is no health or social care, workplace protections or minimum wage. To the Liberland activists, “welfare state” is a dirty word.

Other liberties would also come under threat. The project has been troubled from the outset by the question of whether free movement of peoples would be allowed, with Liberlanders congregated in the Serbian eco-village mocking the emailed residency applications of confused Middle Easterners who mistake the country for a real polity. While Jedlička generally presents an optimistic, modernising political model, Serbian supporters who drove up from Belgrade to visit their President describe themselves as proud “conspiracy theorists”. And this isn’t libertarian trolling: they cite the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Ku Klux Klan associate Albert Pike in arguing that the world faces an imminent race war orchestrated by the same Jewish New World Order they allege was behind the Holocaust. Given no-one actually lives in Liberland, Jedlička is free to place his trust in a notional citizens’ veto to prevent abuses of rights. But it remains unclear how a clash between libertarian ideals of free movement and the survivalist, white-nationalist inclinations of many its followers would be avoided.

Jedlička is able to evade these issues through a mixture of blind confidence and the fact that his project exists only on paper — or on blockchain. A fully-fledged Liberland would resemble real-world microstates, in that it would rely on either the continued “mining” of cryptocurrencies or on accommodating international capital as a tax haven. Quoting a sympathetic, Belgrade-based think tank, Jedlička suggests a tax haven on the Danube would bring a GDP boost to neighbouring states.

But other libertarian projects have failed following local opposition: the 1972 “Republic of Minerva”, an attempt to establish a microstate on reclaimed land in the ocean near Tonga, came a cropper when locals decided not to allow rich Westerners to enjoy a tax-free oasis at the expense of their fishing rights. More recently, a “seasteading” project which aimed to establish a floating utopia near Tahiti, initially backed by libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel, met a similar fate, collapsing following angry protests from locals opposing a “megalomaniacal” project with no clear benefit to the local economy.

Recent attempts to establish crypto-friendly communities of expats in Puerto Rico and Central America have also foundered. Notoriously, El Salvador has witnessed a protracted effort by its president, Nayib Bukele, to force locals into using Bitcoin, while attracting the Western crypto elites to free-market resorts intended to serve as Bitcoin playgrounds. The attempted pivot to virtual currency has been met with indifference and protest. Following the recent crypto crash, the nation came close to defaulting on its sovereign debt. Bukele’s Bitcoin roll-out has also gone “hand in hand” with the introduction of a “police state” characterised by widespread arrests, detentions and torture, including the arbitrary arrest of those opposed to the government’s bitcoin policy. Liberland’s nominal finance minister Navid Saberin, a Luxembourger businessman, admits he personally visited El Salvador and found “no-one had anything good to say” about the Bitcoin pivot. Yet he also remains wholly optimistic that Bitcoin will bounce back, restoring his fortunes and justifying Bukele’s efforts.

Jedlička worries that finance journalists dismiss Liberland’s political programme as too utopian. In reality, the opposite is true. If realised, his “vision” would result in a dystopian combination: reliance on foreign capital which creates little benefit for local communities, undergirded by authoritarian excesses in defence of those elite financial interests. The Liberland proposal is not a challenge to the current economic order. It is its fullest expression, stripped of all protections, checks and balances.

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But this vision has its appeal. In the surrounding states, crony capitalism beholden to EU investment has brought few benefits to ordinary people. Liberland’s President is a genuine and infectious believer in personal sovereignty, and it’s little wonder frustrated young people are attracted by his dynamic, untrammelled version of capitalism, as they are by the get-rich-quick crypto promise. And though Jedlička is keen to distance himself from more playful, performance-based micronations, the political model has also been used to register protest against authoritarianism and homogenisation. Protest projects such as Germany’s Free Republic of Wendland or New Zealand’s Independent State of Aramoana stood up against the profit-driven destruction of local communities and environments, with the latter successfully resisting the state-backed imposition of an aluminium smelter. In nearby Slovenia, the Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) used provocative appropriations of state insignia to critique state authoritarianism.

Though dismissed by Jedlička, this spirit of protest is inherent to both the micronation concept and the libertarian movement. There is room for a more productive critique of an admittedly exploitative global financial system rigged to benefit certain states, which also recognises the limitations of crypto and the role that tax havens and free-market ideology play within that system. For now, though, we have only Jedlička’s vision of Dubai-on-the-Danube, and its handful of loyal followers.

Despite having one of the world’s highest per-capita rates of gun ownership, Serbia had never witnessed a mass shooting until last month, when a 13-year-old boy killed nine fellow students and a security guard at his elementary school in Belgrade. It was the deadliest school shooting in Europe in 15 years – and it was followed by another spree, just one day later and a few miles away, when a 21-year-old man armed with a semi-automatic rifle opened fire as he drove through three villages south of Belgrade, killing eight.

Although a number of American gun-control activists have praised the seemingly swift response by President Aleksander Vučić, the shootings have prompted the largest protests seen in Serbia since the fall of Slobodan Milošević in 2000. While Vučić hastily announced stricter measures, his authoritarian government’s deployment of 1,200 police officers to schools — as well as its threat to bring back the death penalty — were seen by many locals as both insufficient and heavy-handed. A Serbian minister’s claim the school shooting was caused by the spread of “Western values” further infuriated protestors, who accused him of instrumentalising the tragedy in line with a pro-Putin agenda.

In this way, the present crisis illustrates the failures of the authoritarian Vučić government — and, by extension, also of Western intervention in the region. But it also shows the grim success of a particularly American brand of individualistic, sexist rage.

Certainly, the immediate response by both the government and opposition has been a world away from the endless debate in America, which had seen nearly 200 mass shootings in 2023 by the time of the Belgrade massacre. But as Biljana Djordjevic, an opposition MP in a green coalition, tells me, the crisis occasioned by her country’s dual massacres is “bigger than these two tragedies” alone, and represents a potential “moment for this country to change”. Mass demonstrations at the shootings have prompted demands for resignations at the top of government and reforms of the government-controlled media ecosystem. The largest protests since Vučić came to power bespeak a deeper anger with his highly centralised rule, corrupt and inadequate service provision, and lack of democratic norms.

In Belgrade, few doubt that the powerful interests focused around Vučić are trying to prevent any such change from taking place. Last weekend, the president brought his supporters onto the city’s rain-swept streets. Memes on Serbian social media mocked the buses shuttling Right-wing nationalists into the capital, and the provision of free drinks and snacks as an inducement to attendees. (Vučić-branded cereal bars were freely available, with packets of Smoki, the delicious and insanely popular corn puffs, handed out only on request.)

While addressing a rain-drenched crowd, Vučić resigned the leadership of his dominant Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). He made it clear he will remain president while launching a new, centralised political force with which he intends to cleanse Serbia of what he called “severe diseases”. Prominent among those “diseases” will be the “vultures” and “hyenas” the president has condemned as attempting to politicise the shootings.

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Demonstrators parroted government lines – that this was a “gathering”, not a protest; that the event had nothing to do with the recent shootings; and nor was it a rearguard action following the ongoing anti-government protests, which brought tens of thousands of people to the same streets. “This is not related to the shooting,” insisted Ilya, 32, one of a group of muscular, shaven-headed men lined up in front of the stage where Vučić was set to speak. “We just want to show we support our president. If he calls us, we will come.” 

In practice, the “gathering” was a show of force, bringing together pro-government hooligans, war veterans, state employees, Serb nationalists from Serb regions of neighbouring countries, and pensioners in pursuit of free nibbles. The event coincided with a flare-up of violence in Kosovo, provoked this time by ethnically Albanian authorities in the breakaway region, thus providing Vučić with a convenient foil for his calls for national unity. Scores of Serb protesters and Nato soldiers were subsequently injured in clashes. 

It is clear that many Serbians are angered by what they view as the government’s self-serving response to the shootings. A uniquely diverse range of opposition parties — centre-Right, liberal and Leftist — plus various political movements have backed the ongoing anti-government demonstrations. “I’m in favour of a complete ban on weapons,” said Biljana Stojkovic, co-chair of Leftist party Zajedno (Together), “but the presence of policemen in schools can only increase fear and abnormality.” Djordevic notes that the Belgrade shooter came from wealth and the second gunman’s father was an army General, meaning that both could still have access to guns, regardless of official controls.

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In a clear contrast with the pro-government “gathering”, the angry protesters huddling under umbrellas were immediately and volubly political, linking the shootings to what they call a “culture of violence” and impunity emanating from the government. “Why are we here? After 10 years of dictatorial rule, repression, closed media and brainwashing, why do you have to ask?” Slobodan, 52, tells me. Like other demonstrators, he is quick to demand Vučić’s removal, liberalisation and a concomitant pivot towards Europe, away from what Slobodan calls “Eastern despotism”. (Serbia has been on the waiting list to join the EU since 2009, a major stumbling block to its membership being its refusal to recognise Kosovo’s declaration of independence.) 

Indeed, Western policy plays a crucial rhetorical and geopolitical role in shaping Serbia’s ongoing domestic debate. In Serbia, criticisms of state policy are typically articulated through appeals for a pivot towards the West, which are in turn rebutted and echoed in reverse by the government’s supporters. “The issue is the immediate reaction, the claim the system has not failed,” says Djordjevic, arguing that the minister who blamed “Western values” mere hours after the massacre intended to distract attention from government failings. She highlights the second shooting, conducted by the general’s son sporting neo-Nazi insignia, as instead demonstrating the role of nationalist, Right-wing ideology in facilitating the ‘culture of violence’ blamed for the killings. “Blaming ‘Western values’ is a way to promote Putin’s values in Serbia, as a contrast to democracy,” Stojkovic adds. 

Ever since the collapse of Tito’s “third way” socialism path between the communist Soviet Union and the capitalist United States, the Serbian Left has struggled to articulate alternatives to Russian-sponsored revanchism without looking to Europe for inspiration and support, with predictably limited results. Actual European accession, and subsequent investment, remains essentially off the table. As such, the liberal opposition’s courting of Europe has resulted in few positive steps toward the democratisation protesters believe could prevent more shooting tragedies. “We just have to wait for the EU to help us to move forward. Right now we are stuck in a vacuum,” says Stojkovic.

Meanwhile, there are other US “values” that may underpin the Belgrade massacre. As a prescient analysis published just two weeks before the school shooting suggests, ultra-misogynistic ideas promoted by “manosphere” influencers such as Andrew Tate — who chose the Balkan nation of Romania as a hideout prior to his arrest on rape and human trafficking charges — have found an enthusiastic audience among young Serbian men. NGO-led efforts to promote gender equality have struggled to make significant inroads, with feminism and LGBT rights characterised as “Western”, therefore liberalising, therefore destructive influences.

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It’s striking that eight of the nine fellow pupils killed by the school shooter were girls. Though Djordevic cautions it is too early to ascribe definitive motivations to the shooter, the hallmarks of a US-style school shooting motivated by a particular confection of entitlement, resentment and “incel” ideology are readily apparent. Whether explicitly or implicitly, the poisonous notion that young men have a “right to sex” with whichever girl they please constantly recurs as a motivation behind recent US school shootings. (On a US-based “incel” forum, the shooting was rapidly praised by both US and Serbian posters.)

As in America, the idea that young people’s hardships are the fault of a political culture that denies them opportunities for conquest has proven considerably more compelling than the liberal rights order with which the misogynistic ideologues are in constant, self-perpetuating battle. Neither Tate nor Vučić offers any real solution to the genuine challenges faced by the new generations over which they hold sway. But in their own way, each is able to harness and profit from their followers’ misplaced anger. And in both cases, the Left has long struggled to come up with a compelling, organised alternative to their opponents’ strident battle-cries. 

Whether Serbia’s nascent protest movement will indeed prove able to “institutionalise the change people feel in their hearts”, as Djordevic’s claims, remains to be seen. What is certain is that Serbia, like the United States, is in need of political proposals and cultural role-models reaching beyond current polarities. And in both nations, the criticism of a liberal order which has failed to follow through on promises of a better world for the new generation should not preclude the critique of those who prey on young men’s worst impulses.

Rather, President Aleksandar Vučić is treading a necessarily complicated line in a vain attempt to appease both Brussels and Moscow, knowing he must soon alienate either his nationalist voter base or the great powers who have him over a barrel. Among Serbs, polling shows that opposition to sanctions on Russia is considerably more likely to be derived from memories of the devastating sanctions imposed on Yugoslavia in the Nineties (44%), as opposed to a vaguer sense that Russia is the country’s “great friend” (24%). A “noisy minority” (21%) do take an unambiguously pro-Russian stance, but the majority of Serbians still back a policy of non-alignment. It may seem clear to many observers that Serbs have an “irrational” and “distorted” relationship with Putin’s pariah state: but to understand why, we must look West as well as East.

The idea that Serbs are mindlessly pro-Putin is immediately complicated by the presence in Belgrade of around 200,000 exiles fleeing Putin’s Russia — doubtless contributing to Vučić’s recent designation of his capital as a modern-day Casablanca, swarming with foreign intelligence assets. Peter Nikitin, the head of anti-war campaign group the Russian Democratic Society, categorises the Russian expat community into three groups: “former activists and political refugees; those who were never active before the war but got so shocked they felt the need to get active; and apolitical, relocated IT people who want to pretend nothing happened”. This third group is the most visible. One local Telegram channel aimed at Russian expats brims with legal advice, job offers, and tips for treating gastritis (with brandy), offering the chance to “chat about life and migration to Serbia — politics prohibited”. Despite such disclaimers, even the relocated digital nomads’ presence here is necessarily political, testing how deep local support for Putin runs.

One set of Russian young professionals frequents Pub 53, a hole-in-the-wall spot owned by another Russian exile. Here, I meet Ana, a software engineer who emphasises the greater freedom of speech and quality of life available here compared to their native Moscow. “No-one can arrest me for my words,” she says. “I’m gay — you see how my friends are — and I’m just here to live my life. There are lots of liberal Russians here, like me.” As these friends arrive, they toast one another with B52 shots mixed with local rakija brandy. The general openness to people like Ana is partly economically motivated, helping to counteract the steady drain of Serbian young professionals into the EU.

Such stories are not universal. Many less educated men of military age grabbed their bags and left overnight for fear of conscription, and now live in hostels or on friends’ couches while they hunt for work. Each morning, a line of young Russian men can be found waiting below a sternly moustachioed statue of Vuk Karadžić, the father of modern Serbia, hoping to be offered cash-in-hand day labour. “The situation is shit,” says Luka, who used to work in a car factory before fleeing the draft. “Many people are going home because there is no work here, only cleaning toilets or deliveries.” But overall, anti-Putin expats have found a home here. While locals complain about (if they do not profit from) soaring rental prices or supermarket-queue etiquette, actual attacks on anti-Putin activists remain rare. “There is a nationalist minority who call us traitors,” says Peter, referring to a recent assault on one activist. “But even if they think we’re weirdos because we’re against Putin, most people are welcoming.”

Anastasija, a Russian psychotherapist and teacher participating in a protest in Belgrade against Russian war crimes, agrees: “Young people here support Ukraine, but many older people support Russia. We’d like to change this, because people don’t have access to information.” Over a year on from the Russian invasion, turn-out at the demonstration is limited — but an opposing, pro-war protest nearby is even more sparsely attended. There, an Orthodox priest fulminates into a microphone, surrounded by a gaggle of protesters brandishing conspiratorial posters: “Serbia will be freed of the servants of the Antichrist”; “Covid genocide”; “Vučić — Will you break the curse of Nato betrayal?” Neither the well-meant humanitarian appeal nor the apocalyptic rant captures the general public mood, with most bystanders hurrying past.

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Other concerns are more pressing. Prominent Serbian activist Aida Ćorović, recently arrested for pelting a mural of local hero and convicted war criminal Ratko Mladic with eggs, is coruscating towards her compatriots’ nationalism and “selective memory” over their treatment in the Nineties: “One drug, in the form of the Kosovo myth, was replaced by another drug — that Putin will save us from the ‘hateful’ West.” But she makes no bones about the fact that “the main problem is economic. We are number one in Europe for deaths from cancer, people look for food in garbage containers and fight over meat in Lidl, and yet our citizens believe Vučić’s statements that we live in a ‘golden age’.”

Serbian MP Nebojša Zelenović is the co-leader of Serbia’s green-Left Moramo coalition, which stood alone in backing sanctions on Russia during last year’s general elections. Speaking in the apartment where Yugoslav Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andrić wrote his magnum opus The Bridge on the Drina while under house arrest during the Second World War, he explains that locals are exhausted by lack of service provision, corrupt politicians with fraudulent degrees, scant employment opportunities, and continual brain drain to the West. “There is a strong atmosphere that everybody must be for Russia, and for Putin. At the same time, people don’t believe there is any hope for EU accession. There is no goal, we are going nowhere, and this situation could last for decades.” Serbia’s EU accession has been moving slowly, if at all, since 2009. To Zelenović, the EU is missing an opportunity to use Russia’s increasing alienation to draw Serbia into the fold.

Rather, the EU is using Russia’s increasing isolation to push Serbia into both joining the sanctions programme and make concessions over Kosovo. In downtown Belgrade, a group of men stand around a stall operated by the conservative, nationalist People’s Party, demanding a referendum over the “agreement on the path to normalisation” Vučić this year agreed with Kosovo. As its less-than-enthusiastic name suggests, detail of the agreement remains vague, and practical steps forward a still-distant possibility. Serbia typically counts on Russia to prevent greater international recognition of majority-Albanian, partially-recognized Kosovo. But the EU is now pushing Serbia to agree to Kosovo’s potential accession to the UN, EU and Nato, while offering more protection for Kosovo’s Serb minority in return. Damir Hadžiabdić, who supports the People’s Party campaign against the putative deal, echoes Zelenović’s complaints from the Right: “They don’t give us anything. Just a story of EU accession — but it’s been 15 years with no result.”

Vučić is in a bind. Nominally pro-European, he relies on a nationalist base still smarting from Nato’s 1999 bombing of Serbia, who will turn against him if he is seen to cave to Western pressure. “People in Vučić’s own party don’t support [the deal], but they are scared to admit it,” Hadžiabdić says. “They think the international pressure from the West is huge.” There is a general public belief that only Russia (and China’s) vetoes on the UN Security Council have prevented Kosovo from gaining further recognition, as MP Aleksandar Jerkovic, of Right-wing parliamentary coalition “No Going Back — Serbia Is Behind”, observes: “If you start from the wrong, but widely accepted, point of view that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’, you get a simple answer as to why Russia has so much support.” Putin’s popularity in local polls now outstrips Vučić himself.

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The EU has generally seemed satisfied with more cosmetic signs of “reform” (including a failed attempt to hold Euro Pride in Belgrade), while Serbia’s leaders have continued to foster more significant personal and national ties with other powers (Russia’s Gazprom controls Serbia’s only gas import company; in 2021, China saved 10,000 mining jobs). Under Vučić’s premiership, public support for EU accession has dwindled from almost 60% to under a third, showing the failure of the EU’s own investment to create similar political traction, and offering Vučić a convenient excuse for stalled accession talks. EU investment in Serbia actually well outstrips investment from the East, but as Jerkovic explains, a favourable media climate has allowed Moscow to paint themselves as the country’s saviours, while ordinary Serbian people do not see the profits from European investment.

Moreover, as Ćorović indicates, a “constellation” of financial ties still links Vučić’s Progressive Party to Russia: “The party, which was created by Slobodan Milošević with significant support from Moscow, still functions according to the same principles and finds crucial support in the Kremlin.” Vučić therefore faces a Catch-22. Move toward Europe, and face domestic discontent; reject the EU line, and face hard or soft intervention against his rule. “If we make a decision to become part of the West, Vučić will begin to fall,” says Zelenović. “He knows this, so he will buy time, and spend years waiting for [foreign] elections.” Jerkovic echoes this analysis, adding that Vučić’s “pragmatic strategy to buy himself time” will likely last “until the denouement of the Ukraine crisis”, aided and abetted by physical attacks on the media and opposition politicians.

Is there a way out of this impasse? Though wary of the negative impact still more waves of neoliberal restructuring would have on Serbia’s already heavily-privatised economy, progressive opposition figures are generally agreed that closer ties with Europe are necessary to drive reform — particularly on minority rights, the environment, and press freedom. But to Zelenović, Europe’s current approach is all stick, no carrot: “Our voters think the EU forgot us. So what’s the point? If politics just means fighting Vučić, it’s too risky. It would be different if there were hope.”

Jerkovic and Ćorović both condemn Brussels’s willingness to turn a blind eye to authoritarian excesses and non-democratic elections in exchange for security cooperation — resulting in so-called “stabilocracies” where non-democratic regimes are granted external legitimacy , along with the EU’s promotion of extractive mining methods and the brain drain into Europe. “It’s clear to every intelligent Serb that these are double standards. Since the beginning of Serbia’s so-called relationship with the EU, there has been only one topic — what can be taken from Serbia?”, Jerkovic says. As Ćorović puts it, this leaves ordinary people “between the hammer of a radical government and the anvil of European hypocrisy”.

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With varying degrees of weariness, and from across the political spectrum, all three observers want the EU to take a more proactive and equitable approach. (“I am sure that British readers are very familiar with… EU praxis,” Jerkovic adds wryly.) Zelenović’s proposals include: a joint EU-accession process for all six Western Balkan states; EU support in exchange for reforms, such as offering agricultural subsidies in return for judicial reform; and exploring the ways Serbia can proactively support the EU — for example by using its historic links with former Non-Aligned countries in the Third World to ease migration into Europe.

The Yugoslav leadership of the Non-Aligned Movement is a reminder that Serbia was not always at the mercy of the great powers. The eponymous Bridge in Andrić’s novel represents Yugoslavia’s unique, strategic location between East and West. And this was the role adopted by Yugoslav President Tito, negotiating between Moscow and Washington to establish his nation as a crucial interlocutor on the world stage, surviving not despite but because of its position between two power blocs. Negative pressure on a country with these historical memories can only go so far. If the West is serious about drawing Serbia out of Putin’s web, it would do well to listen to both Left and Right and offer concrete support for reforms. Absent such measures, it is little wonder its politicians and population will continue trying to steer a third way through troubled waters.

There is a strict timetable to crises in Kosovo. It runs like this. First, after a disagreement between Serbia’s leader and Kosovo’s, a deadline is set by the Kosovo side to do this or that, or barricades are erected in Serbian-inhabited north Kosovo. The diplomats go into hyperdrive, harsh words are spoken, and the Serbian Army deploys to the border, making sure that clips of military convoys circulate on social media. Serbian nationalists fantasise that they are actually going to do something and Serbian tabloids froth that Kosovo-Albanians are about to wage war against their people.

At this point, parts of the Western media wake up and journalists, who never seem to clock that Nato has thousands of troops in Kosovo pledged to protect it from Serbia, think that it might invade. Then, deal done, the barricades come down until the next time.

Today, we are at the fag end of the latest cycle. The barricades which stood for 20 days have come down and everyone has gone home — but this time, it was a pretty close-run thing. The barricades were in fact trucks blocking the roads in some 14 places. Just over a week ago, as I visited one in the village of Rudare, a colleague pointed out a petrol tanker. People were not very happy about it, he said. It was full; if there were a violent incident, it could explode.

As we spoke, judges, teachers, doctors — in fact it seemed the entire haute bourgeoisie of Serbian north Kosovo — wandered up and down, chatting to friends and warming their hands on flaming braziers. Some were here because they wanted to be, others because their political appointee bosses had ordered them to be. Leaders of the main Kosovo Serb party were here too. At one point, a car zoomed up and four masked young men jumped out and strode off purposefully. In the nearby divided town of Mitrovica, where Serbs live in the north and Albanians in the south, the north is festooned with Serbian flags and spray-painted with stencilled crests of something called the “Northern Brigade”. They read: “Don’t worry… We are waiting!” But who are they? A Serbian militia in waiting? No one knows for sure.

In hushed tones, residents tell me that, in the last year, 600 men have been sent for military training in Serbia. But there is no way to know, unless you start asking questions of people who would really not appreciate them, what is true and what is a misinformation spread by BIA, Serbia’s intelligence service, which is widely believed to hold the whip hand around here. Meanwhile, locals were queuing at cashpoints. With the barricades having closed the two border posts in the north, they were worried that banks would run out of cash.

Ask people in north Mitrovica what they want and, at the end of the day, it is just a normal life — the type that no one here has enjoyed for more than a quarter of a century. But how likely is this? How to cut Kosovo’s Gordian Knot, which has left the fate of Serbs and Kosovo-Albanians (and Kosovo and Serbia) tied to one another? The Kosovo war ended in 1999, but still the diplomats and political leaders have been unable or unwilling to agree on a final framework for peaceful coexistence.

In the wake of Yugoslavia’s disintegration in the Nineties, Kosovo, Serbia’s southern province, remained locked within Serbia — even though its population was overwhelmingly ethnic Albanian, rejected Serbian rule and was repressed by Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia’s then leader who had stripped the province of its autonomy. Following the Kosovo war of 1998-99 between Kosovo-Albanian guerrillas and Serbia, and then Nato’s intervention, Kosovo became a UN protectorate. In 2008, it declared independence. This was recognised by most, but not all, Western countries, and rejected by Serbia, Russia and China among others. Kosovo’s Albanians argued they had the right to self-determination; Serbia argued that its territorial integrity trumped that, even though no one in Serbia actually wanted or wants to reintegrate a region full of hostile Albanians.

Of Kosovo’s population of 1.8 million, some 100,000-120,000 are Serbs. More than half live in central and south Kosovo, while the rest live in the north, a compact area abutting Serbia. Now, say local Serbs in the north, the tables have turned. Marko Jaksic, a lawyer and political activist from north Mitrovica, says that Albin Kurti, Kosovo’s prime minister, “is doing the same things as Milosevic during the Nineties, only we have changed sides.” It is the type of argument that makes Kosovo-Albanians incandescent with rage.

Jaksic and I were talking in the Number One, a hotel café a few hundred metres from the bridge over the Ibar which divides the city in two. He starts the conversation by pointing out that exactly 10 years ago I had asked him what the solution for Kosovo was, and that he had said that the border between Kosovo and Serbia was not “up there”, meaning north of where we were, but “on the bridge”. He believes that Kosovo should be partitioned. It is an idea which comes and goes like the tide. Until he went to The Hague in 2020 to answer charges of war crimes, Hashim Thaci, until then Kosovo’s president, and Serbia’s leader Aleksandar Vucic toyed with the idea, but key Western countries moved to quash it.

Nor was partition popular in Kosovo and Serbia. The problem was not north Kosovo, but rather the precedent. If north Kosovo returned to Serbia, then what about the Albanian-populated Presevo valley in Serbia or the Albanian-inhabited regions of North Macedonia or the Serb and Croat regions of Bosnia and Herzegovina? So, Pandora’s Box remains closed. How, then, can Kosovo-Serbs live normal lives in Kosovo, especially in the north?

The answer to this question is surprisingly simple. With political will there is no issue between Kosovo and Serbia, and between Serbs and Albanians, that cannot be resolved or at least fudged. The two sides have been talking in an EU-sponsored dialogue for more than a decade and plenty of agreements have been struck — even if they have not all been implemented.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has also injected new vigour into negotiations, which are led by the EU’s Miroslav Lajcak, who is supported by Gabriel Escobar, an American diplomat. However, since June, they have been firefighting, tamping down crises over number plates, identity cards and now barricades. But they have a plan, supported by France and Germany, which could be the basis for a long-term settlement. The diplomats talk of the “two Germanies”, by which they mean that Serbia and Kosovo could live side-by-side (like the two Cold War Germanies did), not recognising one another officially but as independent states.

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But this is only half of the equation. In return for de facto recognition, which means being treated like a neighbouring state by Serbia, Kosovo is expected to abide by a commitment it signed in 2013 by which Serbian municipalities in Kosovo could form some type of association, giving them effective autonomy in fields such as health and education. Kosovo’s constitutional court has rejected this and Kurti campaigned vigorously against it in opposition, but now the pressure is on from his Western backers to find a way to deliver it in one form or another.

The current crisis has set back the cause of normalisation badly. Serbs have resigned from parliament, from the judiciary and, in the north, from the Kosovo police force. They also resigned from local assemblies, which triggered elections for new ones which have now been postponed until April after electoral offices in the north were attacked. Tatjana Lazarevic, the editor of the KoSSev news site in the north, says that since the Serbs quit the police, Albanian members of the Kosovo police have been sent north and locals see them “100% as an occupation force”. She adds that Serbs in the north “didn’t want to integrate into the Kosovo state… and neither do they want that today”. But if there is a normalisation deal between Kosovo and Serbia, she thinks, people will just live with it.

If that were the case, if there were a deal, what choice would Kosovo Serbs have?  Kosovo’s north can be a dangerous place. If it is in Serbia’s interest to make a deal, dissent won’t be tolerated. This is a place where politics and organised crime overlap, even more so than everywhere else in the Balkans.

Despite the high-stakes game played with the barricades these last few weeks, it is not all doom and gloom. Lajcak told me: “Tensions have never been higher in 20 years; mistrust has never been deeper.” But Jeff Hovenier, the American ambassador to Kosovo, struck a more optimistic note. He told me that, while the ultimate goal was mutual recognition of Kosovo and Serbia, “which is unfortunately not possible right now, today’s challenges can still be overcome. If you see this agreement, this work as an interim step towards that… there are real possibilities.”

Ivan Vejvoda, a Serbian analyst and head of the Europe’s Futures programme of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna concurs. Despite the current stand-off, “both sides realise they need to do this, but they are still looking for a way in which they turn out to be the winning side, but there is no winner in this. Everyone will lose out on something — or rather, no one will get everything they want. But that’s exactly what compromise is about: to achieve a situation where one goes forward.” He then proceeded to list examples from Northern Ireland to the Faroe Islands to the Basque country to the South Tyrol where all manner of workable solutions for minority rights have been secured.

Kurti himself thinks that Serbia remains uninterested in a compromise and Vucic says Serbia will never recognise Kosovo. Vucic still wants partition, Kurti said to me and talks as if he is “in search of a time machine… sometimes he wants to go back to 1999 and sometimes to 2007 [before Kosovo declared independence], but you know… the train has left the station. We cannot go back there anymore.” Many of the diplomats find Kurti stubborn and that has lost him some Western support, but his policy of playing hardball with Vucic has been delivering results. Vucic is on the backfoot and has had to concede on several issues in the past few months: on 15 December, Kurti applied for EU candidacy and has also finally secured a promise that Kosovo’s citizens will no longer require Schengen visas from 2024.

Yet amid all these technical solutions, a part of the problem — in fact, a very big part of the problem — is personal. A few years ago, I interviewed Hashim Thaci, who had been a leading member of the guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army when Vucic had been a minister in Milosevic’s government. When the interview ended, he asked me: “Are you seeing Aleksandar?” At first, I drew a complete blank — then I realised he was talking about Vucic. There are no such first name term niceties nowadays. Vucic and Kurti despise one another. When Vucic was a minister, Kurti was a political prisoner in a Serbian jail; on 1 December, Vucic publicly called Kurti “terrorist scum”. The lack of any personal rapport makes finding a deal that much harder.

After leaving the Number One in north Mitrovica, Jaksic and I walked to the bridge over the Ibar as I was returning south to Pristina, Kosovo’s capital. You can walk across the bridge, though it has been barred to traffic since 1999. Jaksic told me that, as a court administrator for the unified court of Mitrovica, he and his Albanian colleagues had parted company with tears in their eyes but as friends when he, like all the Serbs in the court, had resigned when Serbs quit Kosovo’s institutions. There was no going back now, he thought. But then we laughed about whether I would still be asking him the same questions in 10 years’ time. If I were betting, I would say there was a 60-40 chance that I will be.

Despite their distance in time and space, not to mention qualitative differences of magnitude and geopolitical significance, the conflicts in Ukraine and Bosnia nonetheless remain entangled. Fundamental questions that have surfaced over the past month — over European strategic autonomy, Germany’s status as a great power, multipolarity and the role of Nato expansion — all emerged with the war in Bosnia.

The German recognition of the secession of Slovenia and Croatia from Yugoslavia in 1991 — in express defiance of the US secretary of state at the time, James Baker — spurred the collapse of the Yugoslav federation, leading to Bosnia’s bid for secession and its slide into civil war. At the time, German defiance of the US was taken to signal the revival of German power in the wake of the country’s reunification in 1990. Yet its fumbling for foreign policy independence was eventually ended by Washington, which reasserted its strategic domination on the continent with a Nato bombing campaign against Bosnian Serb forces that helped bring the war to an end in 1995. Followed by war in Kosovo in 1999, the wars of Yugoslav secession only ended in 2001 with a Nato deployment to end a conflict brewing in North Macedonia.

Although Western military intervention in another multi-national, multi-ethnic ex-communist federation spurred fears in the Kremlin that the West would reprise such adventures in the ex-Soviet Union during the Nineties, the collapse of the Russian state and the low price of oil meant that there was little Russia could do to stymie Nato expansion in the region. Russian weakness helped foster the mirage of a continent that had transcended great power rivalries, which would in turn smooth the path for Nato’s reckless policy expansion eastwards. Nonetheless, there were occasional portents of future conflict, such as when British Lieutenant-general Sir Mike Jackson refused the orders of his Nato commanding officer to fire on a Russian column attempting to seize Pristina airport in Kosovo.

The war in Bosnia and the brutality that defined it shattered the Long Peace that had prevailed in Europe since the end of the Second World War. Today, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has had a similarly shattering effect on a public that seems to have forgotten the wars in former Yugoslavia. Such collective amnesia — which also omits the bloody Greek Civil War that ended in 1949 — evinces a peculiar Eurocentrism, which treats European territory as if it were holy soil consecrated for perpetual peace by European blood, and as if Europe’s bloody history of internecine war makes war less rather than more likely.

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The Nato-led international intervention that brought the wars of Yugoslav secession to an end were seen as restoring the peace of Europe. In reality, however, the diplomatic, military and humanitarian tools developed in the Balkans would become instruments for extending war outside of Europe. All the elements of the international intervention in the Bosnian war would be globalised in subsequent decades across conflicts in Africa and the Middle East. Arms embargoes, sanctions against “rogue regimes”, No-Fly Zones that escalated into bombing campaigns conducted alongside proxy forces and favoured ethnic militias, the deployments of large and militarised United Nations peacekeeping operations, the establishment of protectorates and international criminal courts — all these became the political and military instruments of a new global humanitarian order. Bosnia remains a de facto protectorate of the European Union to this day, hosting international forces and even sporting a blue and yellow flag expressly modelled on that of the EU.

The implications of humanitarian intervention in the Balkans were understood in Moscow even if not in Brussels or Washington. Vladimir Putin has repeatedly cited the precedent of Nato’s 1999 Kosovo War as a legal and political justification for his dismemberment of Ukraine with the annexation of Crimea in 2014, which was modelled on how Nato oversaw the detachment and independence of the former Serbian province in 2008. So we find ourselves in a situation where Russia claims to be retaliating against Nato encroachment in its sphere of influence in Ukraine, while in the Balkans it is Nato and the EU that decry Russian interference in stoking support for Serb secessionism in Bosnia.

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This geopolitical tangle of imperial hypocrisy shows that we are fully returned to a baleful era of great power spheres of influence, depriving smaller powers in Europe of the political space for their sovereignty and independence. The Balkans have been returned to their nineteenth century status, as what was formerly a single sovereign state has been reduced to a clutch of small, dependent states enmeshed in mutual hostility and rivalry as they jostle for great power patronage.

Given the war in Ukraine and renewed geopolitical rivalries in the Balkans, what are the prospects for Europe’s middle and smaller powers to emerge from tutelage? During the First World War, the British journalist H.H. Munro published The Purple of the Balkan Kings, a short story during the First Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, which had laid the ground for the Great War itself. The story recounts the discomfiture of his absurdly named protagonist Luitpold Wolkenstein, a “financier and diplomat on a small, obtrusive, self-important scale” who, while sitting in his favourite Viennese café, is astounded to read of the military victories of the Balkan League in rolling back the Ottoman Empire in Europe. Munro recounts how vital the subordination of the Balkan states was to Wolkenstein’s mental tranquility:

“His judgment had been one of unsparing contempt for small-scale efforts, of unquestioning respect for the big battalions and full purses. Over the whole scene of the Balkan territories and their troubled histories had loomed the commanding magic of the words ‘the Great Powers’…”

Filled with dread at the prospect that the Balkan states might redraw the map of Europe independently of the Great Powers, and that they might even roll their military victories over into a “project of fiscal unity, extending over the entire Balkan lands, and further of a constitutional union”, Munro has his “plump-bodied café oracle” retire from his café in a depressive mood.

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Today, latter-day Wolkensteins are firmly back in charge in Europe, not only in Vienna but also especially in Brussels, with their own equivalents in Moscow. Social media provides them with a hubbub that would easily outdo an early twentieth century Viennese café for its complacent febrility and bourgeois extremism. Thinking of the two Eastern European wars that now frame the rise and fall of the era of liberal hegemony — Bosnia and Ukraine respectively — will Europe’s smaller states ever be able to assert their independence against imperial domination?

There is a real risk that a peace settlement for Ukraine reproduces the problems that have plagued post-war Bosnia, which has been carved up into separate, ethnically homogenous statelets with no meaningful central government able to exert sovereignty over the territory as a whole. Ukraine would also carry the further risk of being torn between West and East, with the two halves of the country divided between Brussels and Moscow respectively.

Describing Russian war crimes as “genocide” risks overshadowing the political questions at the core of the conflict. If Ukraine is to safeguard the independence it is fighting for, it must not only repel the Russian invasion but also avoid becoming a Western protectorate, dependent on Nato arms and EU aid to survive. Neutrality offers Ukraine the best hope of preserving its sovereignty. In due course, a neutral Ukraine may even offer an example of how smaller and weaker European states may escape Balkanisation in the years to come.

There’s a moist sentimentality to these nostalgic reveries that needs to be questioned though. For there’s a particularly persuasive case to be made that the legacy of the fall of communism was wasted in Russia and eastern Europe – it’s particularly true if one happens to be a Bosnian Muslim. While the United States and Britain were basking in post-Cold War triumphalism, Bosnian Muslims were being hoarded into the first concentration camps to be erected on European soil since the Second World War. History had not come to a juddering halt after all. Rather, on Europe’s periphery it was being discovered that communist totalitarianism had merely kept a lid on older resentments that were about to bloodily resurface.

I travelled to Bosnia — the most ethnically diverse of the new republics following the fall of communist Yugoslavia — five years ago, shortly before the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide. I spent most of my time in Sarajevo, a beautiful multi-ethnic town that 20 years earlier was besieged for 1,425 days (nearly four years) by Bosnian-Serb forces – the longest siege in the history of modern warfare. The pockmarks made by the bullets and shells of forces positioned in the hills around the city were still visible. More than 10,000 residents had died as a result of snipers and the 3,000 shells that fell on the city each day.

The war’s bloody nadir took place 80 kilometres away, in Srebrenica, where between the 11th and the 22nd of July 1995, 8,372 Bosniak men and boys were murdered by Bosnian Serb forces. While there, I visited the Srebrenica gallery, a deeply moving memorial to those killed, and a damning indictment of the international community’s failure to stand up to genocidal chauvinism. The gallery’s walls are lined with photos of some of those who were killed. Men — for it is overwhelmingly men — stare back at you from fly-blown photographs that were taken in another era.

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Not all the victims have yet been found, and so the relatives wait. This weekend, another eight Bosnian men and boys will be buried in a cemetery on the outskirts of Srebrenica. A quarter of century after the slaughter, the process of locating, exhuming and identifying the victims of a military operation codenamed ‘Krivaja 95’ goes on.

Back in 1995, the Bosnian Serbs, led by Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, and backed in Belgrade by Serb president Slobodan Milosevic, had decided that they wanted to conclude the war by the year’s end. This meant capturing the three UN-protected ‘safe’ areas of Zepa, Gorazde and Srebrenica. Bosnian Serb forces would henceforth move troops into Sarajevo before the year was out and capture the city they had been lobbing mortars at for four years.

The purpose of the war was to ‘ethnically cleanse’ —a phrase used openly by the Bosnian Serb leadership — swathes of the former Yugoslavia so that Serbs and only Serbs could live there. As the Cambridge scholar Brendan Simms wrote in Unfinest Hour, his book on the Bosnian war, the bloodshed that culminated in the genocide at Srebrenica was not the by-product of war or civil breakdown, “rather, ethnic cleansing was the purpose of the war”.

When the safe zones were initially set up, Philippe Morillon, a French UN general, had told Bosnia’s Muslim population: “You are now under UN protection of the United Nations… I will never abandon you.” Yet Dutch UN peacekeepers stood aside two years later as the Bosnian Serb assault on Srebrenica began. Over the course of three days in the summer of 1995, as politicians and pundits in western capitals basked in a triumphalist post-Cold War glow, those 8,372 Muslim men and boys were pumped full of bullets and thrown into mass graves.

As the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia described it:

“They [members of the Bosnian Serb army] stripped all the male Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly and young, of their personal belongings and identification, and deliberately and methodically killed them solely on the basis of their identity.”

As a result, the Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic are today serving life sentences for war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. Slobodan Milosevic died while on trial for war crimes at the Hague.

During the trials, a chilling conversation that had been intercepted during the genocide was used as evidence to demonstrate intent on the part of the Bosnian Serb chain of command. A group of Bosnian men had attempted to break through from Srebrenica to the town of Tuzla but were captured by Bosnian Serb forces. “Kill them all, god damn it!” Serb General Radislav Krstić can be heard saying to Colonel Milan Obrenović, the chief of staff of the Bosnian Serb army’s Zvornik Brigade. “Don’t leave a single one alive.”

The massacre at Srebrenica was able to take place partly because western powers had spent the preceding year labouring under the pretence that there was no belligerent party in the conflict. The Serbs controlled the fourth largest army in Europe yet a one-sided arms embargo, imposed on the region by the European Community and its member states in 1991, remained in place until near the end of the war, preventing the Bosnians from protecting themselves.

The British government of John Major played a shameful role in keeping the arms embargo in place, a policy it justified by adopting an obfuscatory tone which stressed that the conflict was a civil war and emphasised “complexity” and “warring sides”. “We should remember,” British defence secretary Malcolm Rifkind told parliament, “that the Serbs in Bosnia are not uniquely guilty”.

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By Aris Roussinos

Platitudes —rare are there conflicts in which one side is uniquely guilty — stood in place of an ethical foreign policy. Britain’s foreign secretary at the time was Douglas Hurd, a politician whom Margaret Thatcher said would “make Neville Chamberlin look like a warmonger”. Thatcher supported hitting the Serbs and lifting the embargo. Hurd, however, took Thatcherism to mean something altogether different, and said that there was “no such thing as the international community”. As Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Poland, observed in 1993: “Any time there was a likelihood of effective action [in Bosnia], a particular western statesman [Hurd] intervened to prevent it.”

A host of institutional failures, led the way to Srebrenica, along with a pernicious narrative of false equivalences and a widespread indifference to the plight of the Bosnian Muslims. This unfortunately extended beyond the moral turpitude of the British government. Sounding more like a resentful humanities student than the leader of an international organisation, the General Secretary of the UN at the time, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, brushed off the conflict in the former Yugoslavia as a “white man’s war”.

In October 1994, Boutros-Ghali even flew into the besieged city of Sarajevo and lectured the city’s residents, who were being shot at by snipers when they ventured out to collect water, about the plight of black Africa. Boutros-Ghali’s point was clear: the residents of Sarajevo, undergoing the longest siege in the history of modern warfare, should think themselves lucky that they were not wallowing in mud and rags in the ‘global south’.

It was in August 1995 that Nato finally decided to act against Serb forces, launching Operation Deliberate Force, a massive bombing campaign which consequently brought Serb leaders, fearful of further American bombardment, to the negotiating table. Predictably, pseudo-humanitarians who had said nothing as tens of thousands of Muslims were being slaughtered, suddenly found a cause to rally behind, and rushed to denounce the bombing.

Since the Soviet Union had disappeared, misguided sections of the Left had looked hopefully upon Slobodan Milosevic (and by extension his proteges in Republika Srpska, the proto-Serb state inside Bosnia) as a benevolent guardian of the established order – that order being communist Yugoslavia. The Serbs were thus cast as plucky anti-imperialists engaged in an intransigent last-ditch struggle against capitalism. In actuality, the Serbian leaders had long-ago sloughed off any remnant of Tito’s liberal Stalinism and replaced it with blood and soil nationalism. What the Serb leadership had inherited from Tito’s regime was a vast army and a repressive state apparatus – assets which they used to wage a genocidal war against Bosnia’s Muslim population.

In this vein, Labour Party national treasure Tony Benn blamed everyone but the Serbs for the bloodshed. This included the International Monetary Fund, Germany and Nato. When the White House finally decided to act following the massacre at Srebrenica, Benn pompously declared that the “main enemy is Nato”, and called for the arms embargo against the Bosnians to be “strictly enforced”.

A short time later, the celebrated American professor Noam Chomsky — along with others including Tariq Ali — signed an open letter to an obscure Swedish magazine defending a book which claimed that the genocide at Srebrenica was a fabricated hoax. Elsewhere, the contrarian magazine Living Marxism (later renamed Spiked), the mouthpiece of the British Revolutionary Communist Party, claimed in print that the Guardian’s Ed Vulliamy and ITN’s Penny Marshall — two journalists who had witnessed first-hand the Serb concentration camps in Trnopolje in northern Bosnia — were telling lies. Living Marxism was subsequently sued by ITN and lost, incurring vast damages.

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War is never a glorious thing and the loudest cheerleaders for it are usually those who know they will be somewhere else when the first rounds are fired. But as any credible account of events during the Bosnian war demonstrates, pacifists and ‘realists’ do sometimes end up on the wrong side of history. During the Bosnian war of the early 90s, thousands of people were rounded into concentration camps and exterminated based on their ethnicity in a continent where a few decades earlier the words ‘never again’ had been piously recited following the obscenities of the Holocaust.

We’ve grown accustomed to hearing lectures on the ‘lessons’ contained in the rush to war in Iraq in 2003. Regrettably, we hear less about the things we might learn from the racist murder of 8,372 innocent men and boys on European soil a quarter of a century ago. While the conflict raged in Bosnia politicians brandished words like ‘complexity’, or else shrugged and pointed to incomprehensible ethnic resentments as a device to excuse indifference and inaction. The fashionable doctrine of ‘realism’ engendered a worldview in which smaller states were the mere playthings of larger entities; the human victims of this brutal statecraft were ignored as the mere flotsam of history.

This goes some way to explaining the failures on the part of the British state. Among the activist class, it was a different set of doctrines at work. As the Serbian armies went on the rampage, Bosnian Muslims were looked upon as not quite victims to those whose worldview came marinated in stale ‘anti-imperialist’ dogmas. In their failure to identify the genocidal intent implicit in Serb imperialism, pseudo-humanitarians proved a point once made by Arthur Koestler: ideology is apt to make a person believe that a goldfish is a racehorse. A procession of leftist grandees — Tony Benn, Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman and Tariq Ali — all filtered events in Bosnia through this narrow and distorting ideological lens. As a consequence, each lent credence to a grotesque pack of lies that was used to slander those who had lost the ability to answer back.

One of the lessons of Srebrenica is surely that doing nothing can come at its own terrible cost, even if the bill is settled years later in the bureaucratic and anodyne atmosphere of international courts and tribunals. It was once said that Bosnia would be written on Douglas Hurd’s tombstone. A quarter of a century after that sorry episode and one wonders what posterity will see fit to inscribe as the epitaph of our own era. Syria I am sure. And unless something alters about our current trajectory, perhaps the enslaved Uighurs of China too.

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This lesson has been lost in the fallout from Iraq, but the responsibility to protect — a principle enshrined in the United Nations since 2005 — is not something that ought to be sloughed off lightly, even if the UN itself is a rather toothless instrument when it comes to enforcing the principle. Moreover, do we really want democratic nations to sit out fights with the Slobodan Miloševićs of the world?

Perhaps we do. But then, we must at least be honest about what that entails. Staying on the side-lines is not, and never has been, the same as bringing an end to war and killing.You may not be altogether interested in fascism, but its victims deserve more than mere pity after the fact. Or, as Primo Levi wrote of the Holocaust,

“If understanding is impossible, knowing is imperative, because what happened could happen again… For this reason, it is everyone’s duty to reflect on what happened.”