Good morning! Yesterday, Rogozin threatened Montenegro with rockets, Lavrov hammered the final nail into the coffin of the Open Balkans, and Abazovic wants to redirect tourists to the north of the country.
The end of the Open Balkans
Six months ago, when the whole story about the Open Balkans started and Montenegro’s potential accession to it, I proposed that we should engage in dialogue and if it’s something we must do, see if we can get something good for us from it.
It quickly became clear that there was no dialogue, and that it was an initiative that had to be completed. It was an order created in Belgrade and Tirana.
The main and fundamental problem of the Open Balkans is trust. When Colin Powell was asked what’s most important for successful leadership – he said it’s trust, and that during the first military training in Fort Benning he learned it from the sergeant who drilled him, who once told him that he would know he was successful leader once soldiers follow him on the most dangerous tasks – out of pure curiosity.
Who’s going to follow Serbia anywhere with that leadership? The problem of the current Serbian government is that they don’t know where they’re heading, to the East or to the West. Contrary to them, Montenegro has long determined its path.
But the issues with trust don’t end here. Serbia, Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina still remember conflicts and Serbia’s meddling in their internal political affairs, so it’s not surprising they’re hesitating. North Macedonia and Albania don’t know what coexistence and the war with Serbia look like, so we may, to some extent, understand that they easily accepted to join the initiative.
There’s another dimension of mistrust in Montenegro – the internal one, the one referring to the promoters of this initiative. They are Dritan Abazovic and the minister-tycoon, Goran Djurovic, who use it to additionally antagonize their political opponents – by telling that criticizing the Open Balkan is irrational and unconvincing even though they never had any meaningful dialogue with critics. Instead of ensuring inclusiveness in discussions on this initiative as a prime minister and former deputy prime minister, Abazovic did everything to chase away people from it. So he was lonely in the promotion of the Open Balkans along with Vucic’s Montenegrin loyalists – the pro-Russian DF and the SNP. Such a team of promoters in Montenegro can’t sell Coca-Cola let alone a controversial initiative like the Open Balkans. This way of humiliating the opponents and inability to form broader coalitions is a limiting factor for Abazovic, who can’t get over 6-7% of support and no serious story both in Montenegro and the Balkans can be promoted with him in it.
Sergey Lavrov couldn’t get to Serbia with his plane, and instead of asking Serbia to come and get him and postpone the visit, he decided to make a show out of it.
First Rogozin threatened with rockets, then Lavrov sent a rocket to the Open Balkans by supporting it a day ahead of the Summit in Ohrid. He thus encouraged skeptics to additionally lose trust in this initiative and that it can bring anything good to Montenegro and the region.
It remains to be seen whether Lavrov wanted to cause damage to Serbia or the US, or maybe both. There are many different speculations over the Open Balkans these days and the intentions behind it. Some say that it’s a Serbian-Russian project, that it’s an attempt of the Amercans to weaken Europe and so on.
However, the conditional support of the Americans for the Open Balkans should be interpreted as something most natural that can be expected from the United States. American life philosophy is focused on problem solving. We have a clear problem with integrations and none of us will state that. The EU wants us, but the key EU member states do not want us, and Macron and Scholz and others openly tell us that: the EU will not expand until it reforms itself from within. That’s why the Americans in the Open Balkans saw a rational way to overcome the problem until the EU agrees with itself on what it wants. The problem is that the United States has forgotten that rational drugs have a limited effect in the irrational Balkans. However, this irrationality should not be sought where it was detected by the tycoon minister Djurovic – in the fears of Montenegrins, the people of Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Irrationality is in the intentions of Serbia, which its government reaffirms every day.
EU officials should be trusted when they say they want to expand, but I don’t believe the heads of member states support that, primarily Macron. Montenegro can try to catch the last train and trade with the EU to accept it as a member, as the cheapest way to extend the dream of enlargement. If Montenegro, for example, enters the EU fulfilling the minimum criteria in the next few years, then that would give the EU room for maneuver to wait another ten years to start accepting others from the region. And that would not cost them a lot – because what’s 600.000 population out of 450 million – nothing.
Lavrov thinks he created a problem in the Balkans with his rocket, that he strengthened the differences and created the potential for chaos, but I honestly think that he helped us clear the fog, and see what the alternatives are and how we can speed up the path to the EU. The most attractive is the one presented the other day by Gerald Knaus from the European Stability Initiative, in which he proposed liberalizing the region’s entry into the common market, which would eventually require a minimum number of requirements, with special emphasis on rule of law. If I understood correctly, at the same time, this would enable the continuation of the countries’ path to full membership without obstacles. Thus, two flies would be killed with one blow, firstly, the need for regional networking and experiments would cease, and secondly, integrations would be significantly accelerated.
The initiative hasn’t been tested among the EU member states, but having in mind the statements of the leaders of the member states, it seems to me that Knaus is suggesting something that might solve the Balkan issue.
That’s all for today. Until tomorrow.
Kind regards,
Ljubomir Filipovic, CdM observer
P.S. What I said about Dritan and his attempt to redirect tourist to the north of the country – another nonsense and a proof that we chose an immature man to run our country.
