Abstract
The paper argues that while the Serbian society and political elite are known for treating their country’s accession to the EU in terms of pragmatic utility maximisation, they generally conceive of Serbian relations with Russia, contrariwise, as an identity-laden issue. To prove it, the author analyses Serbia’s behaviour toward Russia along the features of emotion-driven cooperation, found in the literature on identity and emotions in foreign policy. In particular, the paper focuses on Serbians’ especially strong friendliness vis-à-vis Russia, the parallel existence of the Other (the West) in their identity and the particularly strong intensity of their attraction to Russia during Serbia-West conflicts, the reinforcement of their affection to Russia by national traumas, the endurance of the affection’s strength despite conflicting rational interests and negative experiences in bilateral interaction, the frequent occurrence of references to Russia in Serbia’s domestic discourse and decisional justifications and a large use of historical analogies concerning Russia. Finally, the author ponders over the implications of the existent configuration of emotional and pragmatic forces in Serbian politics for the country’s current and future conduct toward Russia and the EU.
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Notes
Incidentally, the social psychological perspective on identity is only one of the three that are popular in IR scholarship. The other two originate in sociological institutionalism and post-structuralism/critical discourse analysis (for a detailed literature review, see Urrestarazu 2015, pp 131–133).
Alternatively, one can use a study by Wendt who, drawing on philosophy of mind and psychological studies, argues that states as IR actors can legitimately be viewed as superorganisms (Wendt 2004, pp 309–311), which implies, inter alia, that they possess sufficient power to make intergroup competition subservient to their necessities (ibid, p. 311). The latter also seems to presuppose that to analyse the emotions of a state, one has to especially focus on, first, its political elite (given their power to make political decisions and strong capabilities to influence public opinion) and second, the majority of its population (especially in democratic countries such as Serbia).
Helsinki Committee 2013, p. 7; http://demostat.rs/en/vesti/istrazivanja/which-empire-to-lean-on-serbia-between-the-east-and-the-west/214.
In fairness, Serbia is hardly the sole country showing such a conduct. Spain, for instance, also displays resolute reluctance to allow Catalonia to hold a legal independence referendum. However, while in the Spanish official/public discourse this issue is mostly regarded as economic, in Serbia, the Kosovo problem has a clear identity-oriented connotation. As Subotić (2011, p. 326) puts it, “Serbia’s emotional hold on Kosovo cannot be explained in rationalist terms, as the territory does not provide any material benefit to Serbia—it is extremely resource poor, is inhabited by a 90% Albanian population that has grown increasingly hostile to the Serbian state, and has always been a drain on already limited Serbian resources”.
E.g., see Helsinki Bulletin 2013, p. 4; http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/putin-wishes-vucic-luck-in-serbian-presidential-election-03-27-2017.
This compares with Macedonia, the other EU candidate which rejected to join the sanctions as well, yet, citing the grounds unrelated to its ties with Russia. Skopje’s reasoning was that penalising Russia for a violation of the international law would be unfair, since Greece, an EU member state, also breaks international norms by blocking Macedonia’s accession to NATO and the EU, facing, however, no punishment from the bloc for that, http://old.balkaneu.com/skopje-reserved-eu-sanctions-russia/.
Interestingly, that exercise was taking place simultaneously with NATO’s exercise in neighbourly Montenegro, in which Serbia itself and all its neighbours were taking part, http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/727622/Russia-and-NATO-hold-military-exercises-in-Montenegro-and-Serbia.
Noteworthy is that when relations with Russia or the three above-mentioned identity-sensitive issues are not involved, Serbia generally complies with EU demands even when it comes to problems of high salience: as the country’s foreign Minister Ivica Dačić said in May 2015, “[w]e [Serbs] back all EU decisions except sanctions on Russia” (quoted in Wohlfeld 2015, p. 2). For instance, Serbia’s handling of refugee crisis has been very positively appreciated by EU officials (e.g. Lilyanova 2016; http://serbianmonitor.com/en/politics/30300/migrants-serbia-acceptance-illegal-immigration-smugglers/#.WasMgchJbIU), while even inside the bloc, the crisis has provoked considerable controversies between and resistance of some of its member states.
It seems, however, debatable how legitimate this concern is. Just prior to being elected as President, Nikolić spoke in favour of Serbia being the “backbone of Russia in Europe”, https://www.sns.org.rs/en/novosti/vesti/we-want-serbia-supporter-russia-eu. However, in a more recent period, Serbian officials have tried to somewhat dissociate themselves from Russia. To exemplify, in July 2017, the country’s minister of European integration Jadranka Joksimović said: “We are Serbs, we are not ‘little Russians’, nor are we a ‘Trojan horse’ for Russian interests in the EU”, http://www.seio.gov.rs/eng/news/440/189/335/details/jadranka-joksimovic-we-are-not-russian-trojan-horse-in-europe/. Also, some authors doubt whether Serbia will be capable of furthering Russian interests once it enters the bloc, given that small states’ weight in EU decision-making process is limited. Đukić (2015, p. 32), for instance, reminds that Bulgaria also used to promise to be Russia’s voice in the EU, but this hardly seems to have happened.
Noteworthy is that in different historical periods in the fifteenth-nineteenth centuries, Serbs’ dominant perception of Russia rested on diverse ideas—of Moscow as “the Third Rome”, of the Russian tsar as “the great Orthodox emperor” and of Russia as the leading force of aroused Slavism—all of which stem from their national identity (Jovanović 2010, p. 17).
Except for the 1948 Tito-Stalin conflict which, however, was a personal dispute between the two leaders and cleared up after the latter’s death.
Commentators note Russia’s growing media presence in Serbia, which seems identical to everywhere, nonetheless, in Serbia, the Kremlin-financed Sputnik news agency arguably enjoys a particularly high popularity both due to the already auspicious favourable public opinion as well as the fact that it is better financed and hence, has wider opportunities than most local media, http://www.b92.net/eng/insight/opinions.php?yyyy=2016&mm=10&dd=24&nav_id=99494.
This happened because Bulgaria had suspended its activities on the pipeline due to Gazprom’s failure to satisfy the terms of the EU Third Energy Package concerning the separation of energy generation and supply. In response, Putin cancelled the project, blaming the European Commission for allegedly hampering the pipeline’s construction. His justification, however, seems hardly convincing, given that the Kremlin had been perfectly familiar with the Third Energy Package’s requirements while initiating the South Stream. Considering this, a more compelling explanation of the Kremlin’s move is that suggested by Wohlfeld (2015, p. 3) who believes that “economic crisis in Russia meant that it was simply no longer able to afford the largely politically driven project—and that economic concerns had significantly higher priority over friendship”.
Perhaps ironically, this seems to somewhat coincide with the Serbian government’s approach to Kosovar Albanians: to illustrate, while claiming the whole Kosovo to belong to Serbia, the government registered solely Kosovar Serbs as voters at the 2006 Constitutional referendum (Stahl 2013, p. 459).
Ibid.
This idea, incidentally, is sometimes directly voiced by Vučić. To illustrate, in October 2015, he told Russian PM Dmitry Medvedev that “Serbia will remain a friend of Russia for rational reasons”, http://tass.com/world/832166. Likewise, addressing the Serbian Parliament in July 2017, he said Serbia wants to be Russia’s friend in order to cooperate economically rather than “because of Pushkin and Dostoevsky”, https://eadaily.com/ru/news/2017/07/07/serbiya-druzhit-s-rossiey-ne-iz-za-pushkina-a-iz-za-gaza-i-investiciy.
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Patalakh, A. Emotions and Identity as Foreign Policy Determinants: Serbian Approach to Relations with Russia. Chin. Polit. Sci. Rev. 3, 495–528 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41111-018-0105-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41111-018-0105-3