Milosevic's political legacy and Vučić's unchanged face

In his memorial speech dedicated to the prominent diplomat of Slobodan Milosevic's regime, who recently passed away, the outgoing president of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, once again revealed his radical face.

Besides the usual quasi-patriotic pathos, his speech was filled with open admiration for the policy personified by Vojislav Seselj, by Milosevic himself, and by the late Vladislav Jovanovic — a policy that led Serbia and the Serbian people in the former Yugoslavia towards senseless wars, mass crimes and exodus, destruction, isolation, backwardness, and, ultimately, towards the greatest losses and shame we have experienced in modern history.

Written by: Dragan Shormaz

A story is circulating in Belgrade about a speech by Vučić, given to participants of the "Young Leaders" course, organized by his party's foundation, where he admitted that for him personally, Milošević's book "Godine raspleta" ("Years of Disintegration") represents a kind of "political bible", which he uses as an ideological orientation for defining national objectives, but also as a guide to avoid the mistakes that Milošević made while implementing his anachronistic agenda.

In the same speech, delivered ten months before the start of the Russian aggression against Ukraine, Vučić informed the audience that he had information that “the US and NATO will attack Russia through Ukrainian territory.” If this story is true — and it is said to have been confirmed by several different sources — then it is clear not only that Vučić has been and remains the most loyal follower of Milošević’s vassal policy towards Moscow, but also the original author of the famous front page of the Informer newspaper, published on the day of the start of Vladimir Putin’s aggression, with the shameful headline: “Ukraine attacked Russia”!

Vučić has built his obsession with Slobodan Milošević's political pamphlet by drawing parallels between the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia, on the one hand, and the current structural changes in international relations, marked by the rise of a "new iron curtain" between Europe and an increasingly isolated Russia, on the other.

"Godine raspleta" ("Years of Disintegration") is a political-memorial book by Slobodan Milošević (published in 1989), written from the then position of party and state leader of Serbia, at a moment when the Yugoslav crisis was already clearly visible on the horizon, but had not yet escalated into the wars of the '90s.

Conceived as a diagnosis of the causes of the crisis in the former Yugoslavia and as a formulation of a "recipe" for overcoming it, today we can safely assert that it was in fact an ideological preparation for national mobilization and concentration of power, with all the consequences that flowed from it.

Although he was a common party apparatchik, guided by his instinct for power, Slobodan Milošević intuitively understood the political and mobilizing potential of the narrative of national identity, which, in the conditions of the crisis of communist ideology, was becoming the dominant political framework. Driven by personal ambition and a deeply Machiavellian approach to politics, Milošević saw an opportunity for political engineering and manipulation of nationalist emotions and fears of the masses.

Under the guise of defending “Serbia and the unjustly discriminated Serbian people within the SFRY,” he initially tried to exploit the national frustrations of the Serbs to impose Belgrade’s hegemony within a centralized federation. When this idea suffered its inevitable and logical failure, all the energy of clever xenophobic nationalism was used to strengthen and prolong his hold on power as much as possible.

In the end, Milošević's entire projection of power collapsed in the clash with the international factor, which constituted his blind spot in political calculations. In the conditions of building a new order after the Cold War, the international community could not remain silent and indifferent in the face of the policy of open violence and mass crimes that Milošević, without any hesitation, practiced.

This is precisely the point that Aleksandar Vučić believed he could avoid, through unscrupulous maneuvers in the power game with international actors and by pursuing the policy of "four pillars" and false neutrality.

In addition to the reason for the moment, there is another, much deeper reason for Vučić's identification with the criminal legacy of Slobodan Milošević. It lies in the same matrix of values, to which both the former Hague indictee and the current leader of Serbia belong. In the 90s, Vučić was shaped as a reckless instigator of war; the public is well aware of his speeches of that time, in which he threatened to kill "a hundred Muslims for one Serb", while in Glina, a few months before Operation Storm, he convinced the Serbs that "the Croatian boot will never again set foot on the territory of Serbian Krajina".

Although, at the time when the radicals "changed their clothes" by becoming progressives, Vučić swore that he had given up his radical illusions and deviations, the moment he consolidated his power — by putting the media, finances, security services, and the underworld under absolute control — the irrepressible and never-surpassed radical spirit emerged from him again.

However, the problem that Vučić, raised in a radical spirit and filled with xenophobia, is unable to understand lies in the deeply anti-democratic and anti-civilizational framework of values ​​within which he tries to define Serbian national interests, and even more so his personal and family interests. The fact that Slobodan Milošević then, and Aleksandar Vučić today, had no allies, was not the cause of their failure, but the inevitable consequence of a policy determined on completely wrong value bases and of an unacceptable anti-democratic methodology for its implementation.

Unilaterally designed, aggressive national objectives, in conflict with almost all countries in the region, always and without exception push Serbia towards isolation and the position of a state without real allies — and consequently without a real chance of being part of the civilized world and the rules on which it is based.

Today, as then, it has been proven that small countries cannot afford the luxury of subordinating foreign policy to domestic political needs. The reason is simple: the price of such an action is so high that small countries cannot afford it. But Vučić, like Milošević once believed that his game of deception towards international actors could slip under the radar of the great powers.

This was perhaps possible in calmer times, until the beginning of the Russian aggression against Ukraine, when the light of the international stage fully exposed Vučić's gambling game and confronted him with the bill that must now be paid. In the global storm that forces states to align themselves according to common interests and values, there is no place for an opportunistic and anti-democratic Vučić, as well as for his regime.

Regardless of his personal fate, which in one way or another will resemble that of his political mentor, Serbia's fate will be such that its citizens will pay the price of another failed political experiment.

Are we doomed to constantly repeat the same mistakes, or is there another path for Serbia? That depends only on us.

Either we will follow, like all our neighbors, the path of membership in the European Union and NATO, or we will remain alone, isolated and excluded. The choice is ours!

The Geopost