Serbia is in chaos. Ten months of anti-government protests following a deadly canopy collapse at the Novi Sad railway station have plunged the country into its most protracted crisis since the ouster of Slobodan Milosevic in October 2000.
Tens of thousands have mobilized on the streets against the country’s strongman president, Aleksandar Vucic, while footage of pro-government militants brutalizing student demonstrators has increased pressure on European and American officials to distance themselves from Belgrade. Claims of an imminent “civil war” are mushrooming in the public discourse—but the implications, and possible conflicts, could go beyond Serbia’s own borders.
Vucic returned to the fore of Serbian politics in 2012, initially as deputy prime minister of the recently formed Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), becoming prime minister in 2014, and finally president in 2017. He had spent the bulk of the 1990s in the ranks of the country’s ultra-nationalist Radicals, however, and later as information minister in Milosevic’s last cabinet. As prime minister and later president, Vucic immediately emulated his former boss. He launched a crackdown against free media; the ruling SNS has been widely accused of systematic election fraud; and he has aggressively reestablished Serbia’s links with Moscow and Beijing.
Yet despite his increasingly autocratic approach he has struggled to contain the growing furor against his administration. Vucic is widely blamed for the collapse in Novi Sad because, on top of all the other criticisms of his government, he has long been accused of handing out lucrative construction contracts exclusively to political allies, skirting safety regulations.
Understandably, analyses of the events in Serbia have largely focused on the anti-regime protests as a vehicle for restoring legitimate, democratic government in the country. Yet such perspectives neglect the implications of regime change in Serbia—or lack thereof—on the broader Western Balkans.
This is a significant omission because since Milosevic’s fall, Serbian leaders have largely continued to center Belgrade’s political and territorial pretensions versus neighboring states in government policy, none more so than Vucic. As a recent Guardian editorial observed: “[Vucic] is a malign presence in the politics of the western Balkans. Beyond Serbia’s borders, he has long cultivated an insidious and destabilising ethno-nationalist agenda in relation to Kosovo and Republika Srpska—the ethnic Serb [dominated] entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina.”
Vucic’s ongoing commitments to the Milosevic-era fantasy of a “Greater Serbia,” carved out of the territories of neighboring states, were most strikingly revealed during the deadly 2023 Banjska paramilitary attack in Kosovo. And despite scathing rebukes by the then-Biden administration, Vucic has continued to signal his aspirations of uniting Serbs across the Western Balkans.
For many outside Serbia, however, it remains unclear to what extent the anti-government mobilizations in the country represent a genuine break with Vucic’s ideological project. That he himself is unpopular is not in question. But the presence of war veteran groups, whose members are suspected of having perpetrated war crimes in Kosovo, and the frequent use of nationalist iconography and rhetoric during the marches, and support for the mobilizations by segments of Serbia’s expansive far right, are all troubling.
Is a different Serbia possible? Would Vucic’s ouster truly signify a transformation of Serbian society—or merely the rise of a new nationalist elite? Serbia’s modern history certainly suggests that attempts at combining democratic rule with imperialist foreign policy are doomed to failure.
A succession of Serbian regimes since 1878 have sought to expand the country’s borders, and except for its acquisition of Vojvodina in 1918, all have ultimately failed. Kosovo and (North) Macedonia’s colonization failed; the union with Montenegro failed; and ultimately the wars against Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina all resulted in defeat.
Even the Republika Srpska (RS) entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the wartime breakaway territory created by Milosevic’s proxy forces and (re)incorporated into the Bosnian state through the Dayton Agreement, is today a political and economic basket case. Its longtime leader, the Belgrade-backed secessionist Milorad Dodik, has been removed from office by the Bosnian courts; its population is collapsing due to mass emigration and sharply declining birthrates; and its ramshackle economy is wholly dependent on Sarajevo.
Most importantly, every attempt at Serbia’s territorial expansion since 1918 has ended with the violence initially directed at neighboring polities eventually blowing back against the Serbian populace itself. There is a through line that can be drawn from the successive expulsions of Serbia’s Muslims after 1835, to the widespread atrocities by Serbian authorities against the Albanian populace of occupied Kosovo and Albania during the Balkan Wars and World War I, to the disenfranchisement of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Bosniaks during the first Yugoslav period, to their persecution and extermination during the 1940s by Serb nationalist militants, through to Milosevic’s wars of conquest during the 1990s, and finally to Vucic’s reign today.
If today the Serbian people truly desire the restoration of democracy in their country, they must reject the imperial megalomania of its leaders—and finally begin the process of historical reconciliation.
Unfortunately, to say so openly in today’s Serbia is still largely taboo. Worse, some fear it risks providing fodder to the regime and its absurd claims of a foreign-backed “color revolution” unfolding in the country.
Yet it remains necessary.
Without the catharsis that can only come through acknowledging the crimes and atrocities of its past leaders, and the reactionary nationalist ideology that has entombed generations of Serbian citizens, Serbia cannot make genuine progress.
A truly democratic Serbia would accept the sovereignty of Kosovo and recognize the necessity of NATO’s intervention in 1999. A truly democratic Serbia would acknowledge the genocidal war of aggression it waged against Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995, and allow that country to finally move, without Belgrade’s (or Zagreb’s) persistent meddling, toward a constitutional regime in line with the European Convention on Human Rights. A truly democratic Serbia would not seek to replace the governments of neighboring states or seek to undermine their cultural and religious institutions.
This much is also true, however: These protests may not deliver the generational change Serbia, and the region, needs. But they have a chance to renew that process. It is a chance for new leaders to emerge, new ideas to be socialized, and new conversations to begin in Serbia. Its neighbors will remain wary of any purported transformation in Belgrade, and rightfully so. Yet they, too, should hope for a thaw in the region’s protracted interstate standoffs, almost all of which have Serbia at their center.
A different Serbia may seem unlikely, but it is possible. Its most basic prerequisite is Vucic’s departure.
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