Western media coverage often presents Serbia under Aleksandar Vučić as a Russian puppet state. In reality, Vučić has been playing both sides in the new Cold War while applying the same neoliberal policies that hold sway in the West.

---

During the 1990s, the government of Slobodan Milošević led Serbia into a third Balkan war. His allies in Bosnia were responsible for a litany of war crimes, including the massacre at Srebrenica. The war left Serbia itself isolated and impoverished, and a protest movement drove Milošević from power in 2000.

Two decades later, Serbia has a president who served under Milošević and supported the wars in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Where is the country going under the rule of Aleksandar Vučić?

Lily Lynch is a journalist who has been reporting from the Balkans over the last decade. She is the editor of Balkanist magazine and has written for publications such as New Left Review and the New Statesman. This is an edited transcript from Jacobin’s Long Reads podcast. You can listen to the interview here.

---

Daniel Finn

What was the nature of the movement that brought down Slobodan Milošević at the turn of the century?

Lily Lynch

In 2000, there was really an unholy alliance of center-left liberals and conservative right-wing nationalists. If you were to identify any shared positions that they had, it would be support for free markets and opposition to Milošević. Those were the two big points that connected them. They also received support from the West — not just rhetorical support, but financial and logistical support — which came predominantly from the United States, but also from the European Union (EU).

It was a kitchen-sink type of government. The idea was, “Let’s bring everybody together who doesn’t like Milošević and overthrow him that way.” Of course, that meant people involved in the opposition who took power had very different reasons for disliking Milošević, and very different visions of what a post-Milošević Serbia would look like.

Daniel Finn

What were the social outcomes of that first decade after the fall of Milošević for the majority of people in Serbia?

Lily Lynch

It depended on which class you belonged to. For the urban, middle-class, educated people who had been suppressed and disenfranchised by Milošević, it was a period of restoration to what they saw as their rightful place in society. I know a lot of people would say it was the best and most optimistic period of their lives. On the other hand, for the working-class people who had formerly comprised the bulk of support for Milošević, it was a very challenging time.

The privatization that took place was a real disaster. I don’t know of anybody who would characterize it as a success. It was a criminal sell-off of Yugoslavia’s once booming industry, which of course had already taken some significant hits through the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and the international sanctions that were imposed before that. You had structural reforms and mass redundancies, meaning that a lot of people lost their jobs.

There was a divide in society between the winners and the losers of the transition process. I would say the class mobility that existed within socialist Yugoslavia disappeared, and you saw a change in the composition of the political elite. You had the middle class and the old wealthier families from before socialism retaking some of the top positions within the political hierarchy. Then you saw people from the working class and from farming families completely disenfranchised and no longer having any role in the political elite.

Daniel Finn

How did Milošević and other prominent figures who had been accused of war crimes during the 1990s, especially in Bosnia, finally end up standing trial at The Hague?

Lily Lynch

The West did what they always do with this region, which is to offer a combination of carrot and stick. From the very beginning, turning in the war crimes indictees to The Hague was seen as a necessary sacrifice for EU accession. It was presented as a requirement of EU membership: you need to deliver your war crimes suspects, and that will open the doors to the EU for you.

Another carrot-and-stick approach revolved around economic incentives. Debt relief and financial aid were contingent upon cooperation with the international tribunal. Sometimes this was very transparent and direct, as when Milošević was delivered to The Hague, and straight afterward, Yugoslavia was granted a tremendous amount of debt relief.

The lingering effect was that the idea of handing over war crimes suspects was perceived within Serbian society as a necessary evil. Perhaps it was something that most people didn’t really want to do or didn’t really support; they didn’t necessarily like the idea of a lot of these suspects being delivered to The Hague. They didn’t think that it was fair, but they felt that it was a necessary sacrifice on the altar of ultimate European integration.

This meant that there wasn’t necessarily a lot of conversation within Serbian society, outside of the NGO and civil society sectors, about the real reasons they had been indicted for war crimes. It was more a question of people saying, “We have to do this, even though we don’t want to, because the EU and the United States expect it of us.”

Daniel Finn

What was happening during this period with the state security forces and the networks of organized crime in Serbia?

Lily Lynch

One of the biggest problems with Serbia’s transition to democracy was that the state security services were basically left untouched from Milošević’s time. There was no process of lustration: those individuals remained in place. The surface might have changed, but underneath, everything remained the same.

During the 1990s, there was a real symbiosis between the state security services and organized crime. This was partly due to sanctions and the criminalization of society that took place as a result of those sanctions, in which ordinary people had to resort to semicriminal activities in order to survive. But from the get-go, there was a murky relationship between the so-called deep state and organized crime gangs.

In 2000, some of the opposition leaders who would become the main political figures of post-Milošević Serbia — namely Vojislav Koštunica, a right-wing, anti-communist nationalist who was the first democratically elected president of Yugoslavia, and Zoran Đinđić, a liberal, center-left politician — spoke to these quasicriminal state security officials. They made a gentlemen’s agreement with them: “You won’t fire on protestors, and in exchange, we’ll leave you alone after we come to power.” From what I understand, that was the agreement between them.

A couple of years later, Zoran Đinđić was the prime minister and he was under tremendous pressure from the West. I also think that he believed tackling organized crime was essential if Serbia was going to advance. He started to take certain actions that would ultimately have threatened these criminal structures linked to the state security forces. In response, they assassinated Đinđić in March 2003. Of course, that was a huge shock for Serbian society.

I would say Đinđić’s assassination inspired a mythology that took hold, according to which Serbia could have gone in another direction if only he had not been killed. Đinđiće was very well-educated and was considered a more enlightened figure: neighboring countries would have much preferred to deal with him as a partner in power in Belgrade.

For those who subscribe to this mythology, the fact that he was cut down in his prime meant the end of that dream of a different kind of Serbia. Perhaps there is some truth to that version of events. But I think there are also problems with this line of thinking, because it gives this segment of liberal, center-left Serbia an out, allowing them to say that everything would have been okay if only Đinđić was not assassinated.

Essentially, those state security/organized crime structures have never gone away and remain a component of Serbian society. By extension, they also have influence in neighboring countries. Of course, one of the darker realities is that the current president, Aleksandar Vučić, has connections to those criminal structures.

Daniel Finn

That brings us on to the next question that I wanted to ask. Looking at the rise of Aleksandar Vučić, what was his political background and track record, and how did he become prime minister and ultimately president of Serbia?

Lily Lynch

Vučić started his political career as a member of the Radical Party of Serbia, which was a far-right party, known during the 1990s as being very intimately connected to the state security forces. It was used by Milošević almost as a way to portray himself as a moderate figure, because the Radicals were so extreme and so far to the right.

Vučić actually served as minister of information under Milošević in the last years of his rule and became notorious as a zealous pursuer of critical journalists. He figured out at an early stage that controlling Serbia’s media was essential to holding power, and he also understood the necessity of maintaining a close relationship with organized crime and the deep-state security services.

He was an extreme figure, who famously said during the war on Bosnia, “We’re going to kill a hundred Muslims for every Serb.” Because of statements like that, he was considered to be a very odious figure, both for the domestic opposition and for people elsewhere in the region who were not Serbs. He remained a rising star in the Radical Party all the way through to the period after Milošević fell, when they went into opposition.

This continued through the mid-2000s until the latter part of the decade. That period of time was the pinnacle of support for EU membership in Serbia: people saw their future as being in the EU, regardless of their political orientation.

Yet the Radical Party, of which Vučić was one of the leading members, had always been hostile to the EU. After the 2008 election, when the Radicals lost to the Democratic Party, the liberal, center-left group associated with figures like Zoran Đinđić, they realized that they would need to change their ways if they were ever going to enter power.

Another important thing which happened in 2008 was that Kosovo declared independence from Serbia. Of course, Serbia still does not recognize Kosovo’s independence to this day. There was a strong pushback against Kosovan independence from Serbian nationalists, including Vojislav Koštunica, who was the prime minister at the time. The exact circumstances of what happened are disputed, but essentially, Koštunica allowed nationalists to attack the US embassy and set fire to it.

As a result of that incident, US diplomats decided that it was essential to make sure that Koštunica lost the next election. They believed that Washington had to engage in some form of tinkering or tampering with the Serbian political landscape to make sure this guy understood that he could not allow the US embassy to be attacked. They encouraged the leader of the Socialist Party of Serbia, which was Milošević’s old party, to split from the Radicals and go with the Democratic Party.

At the same time, there was an idea among US officials, particularly the ambassador at the time, Cameron Munter. They said to themselves, “What if we had a right-wing party that was pro-US and pro-EU?” — because, of course, Serbia in general is a very nationalist country and the majority of people tend to be fairly conservative nationalists.

The thinking was that somebody with nationalist credentials could get things done in a way that the Democratic Party couldn’t. What I’m speaking of here is mostly the question of resolving Kosovo’s contested status and normalizing relations between Serbia and Kosovo.

At this point, very opportunistically, Vučić and another high-ranking member of the Radical Party, Tomislav Nikolić, decided to create a splinter party. They broke away from the Radicals and formed the Serbian Progressive Party, which has dominated Serbian politics for the past twelve years. It began with the idea that they needed to embrace pro-EU policies. This was very much encouraged by the US, which thought that it could make inroads with Serbian nationalists who had formerly been very anti-American and anti-West.

In 2012, there was an election that the Serbian Progressive Party won, and Vučić’s political partner Nikolić became president. At the time, Vučić only occupied the position of deputy prime minister. But he soon started amassing tremendous power through a multiplication of roles. At one point, he was deputy prime minister, defense minister, and head of BIA (Security Intelligence Agency), the security service, all at the same time. He also ended up purging all of Nikolić’s people from high positions within the party and restaffing those positions with his own loyalists.

At the same time, during those years, you had a tabloidization of the Serbian media, which had always left something to be desired, even under the rule of the Democrats. The greater part of the media became a mouthpiece for Vučić, with tiny pockets of oppositional media outlets. The Democratic Party, which had been the dominant force in Serbian politics after Milošević, was pulverized, and they now have a very low level of public support. Vučić was very talented (and remains very talented) at creating splits within the opposition to divide and conquer.

He also embarked on a populist anti-corruption crusade in those first years in power, arresting so-called oligarchs — we would call them tycoons — and exploiting the righteous anger toward the Democratic Party, which had overseen the criminal privatization process. Harnessing that anger was a wise political strategy. This was the period immediately after the global financial crisis, and he was able to stoke resentment toward the center-left forces that had been in power since Milošević fell. This approach ended up being very successful for him.

Daniel Finn

What would you say is the nature of the political hegemony that Vučić went on to establish over the last decade? To what extent does it rely on direct coercion, up to and including the most recent elections that were held toward the end of last year?

Lily Lynch

The exact nature of the regime or government is a matter of some academic dispute, but I think people have settled on the idea of competitive authoritarianism. Although you have elections and political pluralism, the system is heavily gamed in favor of the ruling party. The opposition doesn’t really have any access to state television, and the media is so heavily in Vučić’s corner that opposition parties cannot get any fair coverage. The judiciary is captured by party interests, and the state security agencies are operating as an arm of the ruling party.

At the same time, the opposition has not been particularly successful in articulating an alternative program that would be attractive to the public — they are mostly good at criticizing and saying what Vučić does wrong — so I don’t want to let them entirely off the hook. But in terms of coercion, there is a good deal of pressure applied to public sector employees, who are expected to vote for the ruling party in exchange for maintaining their employment.

The opposition is convinced that in the absence of such coercion — whether that means literal vote buying or pressure to vote a certain way if you want to keep your job — people would see the light and vote for them. I’m not quite as sure of that as they are. However, there’s no question that there is a tremendous amount of coercion and enforced, top-down conformity within a lot of institutions, from academia to the public sector.

There is an expectation that you keep your head down or else face the consequences. It’s not that people are being assassinated — it’s more analogous to Hungary under Viktor Orbán, for example. People are afraid to stand out for fear of professional consequences. In the recent election, there was a shocking episode involving one opposition politician, who wasn’t a major figure or someone who was likely to receive a big vote.

About a year before the election, he had a break-in at his apartment and a laptop was stolen. On the eve of the vote, the progovernment TV station started playing a private sex tape that had been found on that laptop. They were playing it on morning television! Clearly his apartment had been broken into by someone connected to state security, and the contents of that tape had been shared with the government.

They used it as a way of attacking him. As well as being intended to discredit the opposition, presenting them as degenerate and out of line with the good, pure Serbian people, this was supposed to keep everybody on their toes and stoke up fear and paranoia: “We’re watching you, and you can never get too far without facing consequences for your personal life.” That is the fear that exists within media and political circles in Serbia.

Daniel Finn

What are the main features of the economic model in Serbia today?

Lily Lynch

I’ve seen it described as authoritarian neoliberalism, which I think is a perfect way of characterizing the ruling party’s economic policies. In a way, those policies are a more extreme version of what has been happening in the Western liberal democracies. Since 2008, with liberalism facing more criticism and a populist backlash, you see fewer appeals to how great it is and more reliance on coercive practices. You even see in the West liberals becoming more comfortable with authoritarian tactics and censorship.

This is more or less the same system that exists in Serbia, but it’s easier for us to recognize it for what it is. You have the gutting of any protections for workers, while at the same time Vučić will say that unemployment is down, although this involves the rise of more precarious types of employment. You have an influx of foreign investment with a total lack of transparency around it.

The ultimate example of that is the Belgrade Waterfront Project, with petrodollars from the Gulf flowing in to create a bizarre “Dubai on the Danube” megaproject, which doesn’t make any sense historically or in terms of Serbia’s architectural heritage. There was no consultation with urban planners or with the public, and the contracts were awarded in a shady manner.

This is a top-down, neoliberal approach to city planning, which is very menacing for a lot of people. At the same time, to sustain the unpleasant economic reality, Vučić is using a lot of nationalist rhetoric to pander to people who might otherwise be outraged with him on account of these changes.

Daniel Finn

If we look at some of the other territories that were still part of the rump Yugoslav state — even after the general breakup of Yugoslavia in the early ’90s, during the period after the fall of Milošević — Milo Đukanović guided Montenegro toward a break with Serbia and remained in power for two decades before finally losing the presidential election last year. What was the nature of his rule in Montenegro, and how did it come to an end?

Lily Lynch

Đukanović was another very smart autocratic figure. He was in power for the best part of three decades, almost continuously, which is longer than Vladimir Putin has been in power. During that time, he was very adept at sensing which way the political winds were shifting — he was a brilliant chameleon.

At one point, he was a close associate of Milošević and used the same kind of nationalist rhetoric against some of the other peoples of the former Yugoslavia. Later on, when it became politically expedient, he decided to embrace the West.

There’s no question that his style of rule was highly corrupt and criminal. There was mass cigarette smuggling, for which he was indicted, between Montenegro and the Italian port of Bari: speedboats would be loaded with cigarettes and taken across the Adriatic to Italy. The United States very much supported Đukanović, and there were even reports that the United States interfered with the Italian criminal justice system and advocated on his behalf, saying, “We need this guy — go easy on him.”

Ultimately, Đukanović had immunity because he was in power, so he didn’t have to face any charges. He was always very good at getting away with things. It was a very ugly time for opposition media outlets, during which there were a couple of attacks on journalists: one was shot, and another had their home firebombed. Remember, this is a ruler who was heavily backed by the West.

I would say Đukanović’s two major contributions to Montenegro’s history were as follows. First of all, there was the referendum that led to the country’s independence from Serbia in 2006. Secondly, there was Montenegro’s entry into NATO. After the annexation of Crimea by Russia, there was a reinvigoration of the NATO enlargement process, with Macedonia and Montenegro joining.

As you can imagine, after all those years in power, he had a lot of enemies. His rule was sustained by exploiting divisions in Montenegrin society, largely between those who considered themselves Serbs and those who didn’t, whether they were Montenegrin or belonged to one of the minority groups like the Albanians or the Bosniaks.

Đukanović courted those minorities, but in order to sustain his role, he needed to depict the large Serb community as a fifth column. He labeled all the Serbs living in Montenegro as génocidaires and painted a large segment of society with one brush.

It was a very calculated approach that worked for a long time, until it didn’t — until people realized that he and his inner circle were enriching themselves through corruption. At the same time, it was known that receipt of welfare benefits, for example, was contingent upon supporting Đukanović, so there was an ugly form of state capture by the president and his party. At a certain point, a politically heterogeneous group of people banded together to kick him out, so he finally did lose an election and now his party is in opposition.

Daniel Finn

What kind of political system and culture would you say has developed in Kosovo since the NATO war in 1999? How is Kosovo’s relationship with Serbia likely to develop?

Lily Lynch

During the first years after the NATO intervention and the fall of Milošević, Kosovo was officially a protectorate of the international community. Some people would say that it’s still a de facto international protectorate today. But in 2008, Kosovo declared independence from Serbia, as I mentioned earlier.

I would say the first leaders of Kosovo tended to be quite corrupt, but I would also say it wasn’t just them. There was also corruption that the international community was very much involved in during their time administering democracy there.

Things began to change several years ago, with Albin Kurti coming to power as prime minister from 2020. Before that, Kurti had been an activist — I would describe him as a sort of left-nationalist, who believed that Kosovo should have real independence instead of being a de facto protectorate, and who also protested against parasitic multinationals coming into Kosovo.

Kurti is not corrupt, and I think that ruffles the feathers of many Western actors in the region, who have grown accustomed to dealing with corrupt politicians. As my discussion of Đukanović suggests, they were fine with corruption and may even have preferred it because it got things done. They don’t really know what to do with Kurti — they find him to be stubborn and difficult.

With respect to the second part of your question about relations between Kosovo and Serbia, it’s important to look at how they have evolved over the last decade or so. You have to take the changing global context into account as well. In 2013, the Brussels Agreement was signed, normalizing relations between Kosovo and Serbia. At the time, EU enlargement in the Balkans was still a realistic goal in the thinking of many people, including those in Belgrade.

In the years following that agreement, however, you had Brexit as well as internal crises for the EU and the refugee crisis. All of a sudden, there was less appetite for enlargement, and many people within the EU who had previously been supportive turned their backs on the idea. This changed the context for diplomacy between Serbia and Kosovo.

We can debate whether there was ever a real desire on Serbia’s part to normalize relations — that’s a contentious point. As I mentioned earlier when discussing Vučić’s rise to power, a lot of people saw him as potentially being a partner for resolving the status of Kosovo, with de facto recognition or even real recognition of its independence by Serbia.

There was always a strategic ambiguity about the negotiations between Kosovo and Serbia, with the participants not being on the same page about what they thought they were going to get out of the talks. In the short term, that might have been fine as a way of getting people to sign something. But you can only maintain that sort of ambiguity for a certain period of time if Serbia is thinking it will never recognize Kosovo as an independent state while Kosovo is expecting to eventually secure that recognition.

In recent years, we have seen a deterioration of the relationship between Serbia and Kosovo, insofar as there was a relationship at all. Albin Kurti is a very idealistic person who has his own vision of how things should look. Meanwhile, Vučić is in power in Serbia: with EU membership no longer looking like a credible goal, he has less of an incentive to pander with EU-friendly rhetoric and he has taken a more anti-Western line, especially around the time of the pandemic. I don’t think there has actually been a real pivot from Vučić in terms of his policy, but certainly in terms of rhetoric, there has been a shift.

When it comes to the future, I don’t have a very positive outlook. I think it’s very likely to be bleak, although I’m not sure how bad it could get. One of the lessons I have learned from covering this region for a long time is that things can remain at an elevated level without ever devolving into full-scale war.

The potential for a return to war in Kosovo is not that high, if for no other reason than the fact that you still have the presence of troops from the NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR) who have never left the country. The presence of those soldiers is now welcomed by the Serbian community as well. Perhaps that is because they see it as a way of delegitimizing Kosovo as an independent state, but the reality is that to a certain extent, both Kosovar Albanians and Serbs want the KFOR troops to remain there.

I don’t see the potential for full-scale war as being very high, although I do think low-level violence is assured — you have spasms of violence where handfuls of people are killed. I could see that happening and maybe even something worse, but I don’t think a return to the conflict of the 1990s is possible unless there are some dramatic changes on the international scene, with an expansion of the current confrontation between Russia and the West.

Even if that were to happen, we should remember that the Serbian military now shares intelligence with NATO and has engaged in more joint exercises with NATO than with Russia in recent years. I don’t see the prospects for war as being very high, but I also don’t see much prospect of a resolution with Kosovo getting what it wants, whether that means full recognition or even de facto recognition from Serbia. I also don’t expect Serbia to get what it wants, because Kosovo is not a part of Serbia anymore — that’s the reality.

Daniel Finn

On that point about the wider international scene, you’ve argued that the image (which is quite widespread in the Western media) of Serbia under Vučić as a reliable Russian ally in the Balkans is greatly exaggerated. What has really been going on under the hood in terms of Serbia’s geopolitical positioning?

Lily Lynch

This is certainly one of the most fascinating things about Vučić. He is a pioneering figure in the sense that he has played Serbia’s cards well in the current phase of geopolitical realignment. He has maintained close relations with the United States and the EU, as well as with Russia, China, and Turkey.

Remember that Belgrade was the city that hosted the first conference of nonaligned states. They have promoted continued positive relations with the Global South more than any other country in Europe. Vučić is a skilled player in the sense that he has maximized Serbia’s position.

There are various reasons why people portray Serbia in one-dimensional terms as a Russian puppet state. It’s a very advantageous propaganda point for a lot of people. Vučić knows that the majority of the Serbian population is either neutral or sympathetic to Russia. That doesn’t necessarily mean they are ardently pro-Putin — although there is that segment of Serbian society — but it is mostly a question of people being anti-Western as a result of the sanctions and the NATO bombing campaign.

At the same time, there are people in Serbia’s neighborhood who want to keep Western eyeballs on the region because they don’t trust Serbia for reasons that are, again, well rooted in recent history. Depicting Serbia as a Russian puppet state is a good way of doing that because unfortunately, the West seems incapable of engaging with anywhere in the world other than through the lens of geopolitics and Russian meddling. It’s a very simplistic way of seeing the world, but you can’t get the West’s attention unless you say, “Russia is here — this is the next front.”

Is Russian influence very much present in Serbia? Yes. If you visit Serbia as a tourist, you will see Putin T-shirts for sale. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, you will see “Z” T-shirts and graffiti that will make you feel that this place is much more pro-Russian than anywhere else in Europe. That characterization is not wrong in terms of popular sentiment, although people in Serbia are very tired of war.

Still, what you have going on in Serbia is a form of hedging combined with the heritage of nonalignment. I hear the line from State Department types who say that “Serbia cannot sit on two chairs at the same time.” What they mean is that Serbia cannot be friends with both Russia and NATO.

But that’s exactly what [Josip Broz] Tito did during the Cold War! That’s a comfortable position for Belgrade — it’s where they’ve been for a very long time. They feel that this position is one that brings them respect. This form of military neutrality is now almost a part of Serbia’s identity.

As I noted earlier, Serbian forces participate in NATO military exercises, and Vučić holds press conferences with the secretary general of NATO. If you listen to what NATO officials or US diplomats are saying about Vučić, the message is very positive. This doesn’t sound like a Russian puppet state. After all, Belarus is not taking part in NATO military exercises, and you don’t hear Aleksandr Lukashenko being praised by the State Department.

You could say that part of this derives from frustration with Kosovo and Albin Kurti on the part of Western government officials. Some people in the West seem to think, “Couldn’t you just be corrupt, and things would be so much easier?” They are nostalgic for some of the Kosovar leaders who came before Kurti.

Chinese influence in Serbia is probably growing much more rapidly than Russian influence, and if you look back to the period before Vučić came to power, it was the liberal, center-left Democratic Party that negotiated the sale of a majority stake in the state gas company to Gazprom. There hasn’t been a dramatic change in Serbian foreign policy since the fall of Milošević. They have always said, “We want to have relations with Russia, we want to have relations with the US, and we want to be a member of the EU.” That has been the consistent message.

You have a quarter of a million Russians who have gone to live in Serbia since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. They are predominantly antiwar and anti-Putin in their outlook. For the most part, Serbia has welcomed those people, although nationalist elements of the security services who do have a direct line with Moscow have harassed some of the more prominent Russian activists. In general, however, Serbia has opened itself up to this influx, which has changed the character of the country in a very positive way, bringing new energy.

If you go to Belgrade and see the T-shirts and the graffiti, you might think, “Okay, this is a Russian puppet state.” But behind closed doors, I would say that Serbia has probably moved closer to the West in many ways under Vučić than it has to Russia.

---

This post was originally published on Jacobin.