warontherocks.com

Biden and the Western Balkans - War on the Rocks

Vuk Vuksanovic

17-21 minutes

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A lot was at stake for the Balkans in last November’s U.S. presidential elections. Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić made a failed bet on Donald Trump, hoping that the United States under Trump would continue to be more sympathetic to Serbian interests in its settlement of the Kosovo dispute and other matters. U.S. foreign policy toward the Balkans under Trump was marked by a disdain toward the European Union and lack of continuity, best symbolized in the economic normalization agreement between Belgrade and Priština brokered in September 2020. While Vučić still congratulated Joe Biden for his win, other Balkan leaders were probably much more relieved at the prospect of a Biden presidency.

Under Biden, U.S. policy in the region is expected to have a more trans-Atlantic focus, and it will energetically demand the resolution of remaining regional disputes, like Kosovo. In a letter sent to Serbian and Kosovo leaders in February 2021, Biden called for a solution based on “mutual recognition.” Biden is evidently passionate about resolving this dispute, as he repeated the same set of themes on mutual recognition in a more recent letter to Kosovo’s new president, Vjosa Osmani. Many policy hands, including Nicholas Burns, one of Biden’s advisers and a potential U.S. ambassador to China, now expect that Biden will display U.S. leadership in the region. Specifically, Burns expects the White House to advocate resolving the issue of Kosovo, promoting liberal democracy, and integrating the region in the West while cooperating closely with the European Union.

U.S. officials will have to deal with three sets of challenges in the Balkans: the unresolved Kosovo dispute, democratic backsliding in the region, and the influence of Russia and China. While U.S. power is a necessary element in resolving these challenges, the Biden administration will not be able to offer quick fixes. Instead, the United States should have a more modest, calibrated policy on issues like Kosovo and democratic development, while on Russia and China, it should offer alternatives alongside the European Union, rather than try to eliminate Russian and Chinese influence through pressure.

The Unresolved Kosovo Dispute

Kosovo continues to be an unresolved challenge for U.S. policy in the Balkans. For the past decade, Washington left the responsibility for the Kosovo dispute to the European Union as the United States dedicated its attention elsewhere. Since 2011, Brussels has mediated a dialogue on the normalization of relations between Serbia and Kosovo. The United States mostly provided support from the sidelines in the form of encouraging political statements. In fact, during the Obama administration, then-Vice President Biden was the point man for the Balkans and Kosovo issue. Indeed, in 2009 Biden was the first senior U.S. official to visit Serbia in a quarter-century. Biden affirmed American support for the dialogue in 2016 when he visited Serbia and Kosovo.

European efforts to resolve the biggest Balkan dispute (Kosovo) began faltering around 2018. Kosovo unilaterally imposed 100 percent tariffs on Serbian goods, asking for full recognition from Serbia in exchange for their removal, a no-go for Belgrade. President Donald Trump searched for a foreign policy win for his failed reelection bid and decided to act on the Kosovo dispute via his regional envoy Richard Grenell. Trump’s policies were transactional, whimsical, and produced no meaningful results. The administration first backed and then gave up on the idea of a land swap between Serbia and Kosovo. To bring back Serbia to the talks, the United States asked Kosovo to lift the tariffs imposed on Serbia. After Priština refused, the United States retaliated in March 2020 by encouraging a no-confidence vote against the Kosovo government.

Some believe that Biden will be able to succeed where Trump failed. Biden already has met Serbian leaders several times during his long career in Washington, where he served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as vice president. In addition, he enjoys high popularity in Kosovo because of his pro-interventionist stance against Slobodan Milošević’s regime in the 1990s. Kosovo even named a street in Priština after Biden’s late son, Beau, who worked in the country in the late 1990s for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The sentiments are mutual and Biden said during his 2016 visit to Priština: “Beau loved this country like I do.”

Democratic Backsliding

Another challenge for Biden will be doing something to halt or reverse democratic decline in the Balkans. In recent years, local elites in countries like North Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia degraded democratic institutions and consolidated their grip over their respective countries. The West was willing to tolerate these illiberal tendencies as long as the local regimes contributed to regional stability, prompting some specialists to call this phenomenon “stabilitocracy.”

Some Balkan strongmen lost power. The former prime minister of North Macedonia, Nikola Gruevski, fled to Hungary in 2018 after 10 years of rule marked by corruption and misuse of the intelligence services. In Montenegro’s 2020 parliamentary elections, the Democratic Party of Socialists of Montenegro, led by Milo Đukanović, lost after being in power for 30 years (75 years, considering that the party is a successor to the Yugoslav Communist Party). However, Đukanović remains the president of Montenegro. These countries are still far from being mature democracies.

Since 2012, the region’s most strategically consequential country, Serbia, has been ruled by the Serbian Progressive Party, led by Aleksandar Vučić and his coalition partners. This ruling coalition has been composed out of former associates of Serbian strongman Slobodan Milošević. The degree of dominance that Vučić and his allies have over Serbian institutions, media, and intelligence services prompted Freedom House to classify Serbia (alongside Montenegro) as a hybrid regime. The draconian measures used to combat the COVID-19 pandemic in Serbia and the Balkans helped cement the extant democratic backsliding. After the opposition boycotted the last parliamentary elections in 2020, on the grounds of unfair conditions, the ruling party has a two-thirds majority without opposition representatives. According to surveys, half of Serbian citizens believe there is no democracy in their country.

Some are optimistic that the new Biden administration will act as a check on the region’s illiberal trends. The State Department’s most recent human rights report was not lenient on Serbia and the rest of Southeast Europe, with criticism leveled on media freedom and police brutality issues. The European Union is also taking a tougher line on human rights in the Balkans, at least in terms of public statements. In the last European Parliament report on Serbia, the country was criticized for backtracking on the rule of law, freedom of expression, corruption, and organized crime.

Russia and China

As North Atlantic powers have paid less attention to the Balkans in recent years, other countries have moved in to fill the power vacuum. This list includes Turkey, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and most notably Russia and China. Despite the limits of Russian influence in the Balkans, Moscow has been adept at capitalizing on three instruments in the region: its own soft power, Russia’s energy reserves, and the unresolved Kosovo dispute. The last one is particularly effective at tying Serbia to Russia, because as long as Serbia lacks a solution that is acceptable domestically and internationally it has to rely on Russian diplomatic backing, primarily in the U.N. Security Council. This is why Belgrade has not fully severed ties with Moscow despite the cooling down in mutual ties in the past couple of years. The region’s energy dependence on Russia has also increased as Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina will be getting their gas via the TurkStream pipeline. In addition, Russia has exported the Sputnik V vaccine to Montenegro, North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and potentially Albania. Serbia even signed an agreement to start producing Sputnik V vaccines on Serbian soil.

China poses an even greater challenge to Western interests in the Balkans. Unlike Russia, which solely acts as a spoiler power obstructing the West, China is a rising power offering a strategic vision for Eurasia with its Belt and Road Initiative. In the past decade, Chinese firms invested $2.4 billion in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia. At the same time, Beijing has provided $6.8 billion in infrastructure loans. In Serbia, China is the third-largest foreign direct investor (accounting for 6.61 percent of all net foreign direct investments) after the European Union (72.27 percent) and Russia (11.21 percent). In Montenegro, China owns 25 percent of the country’s public debt. Beijing is supplying Belgrade with drones. The recent visit by Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe to Greece, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Hungary suggests that China wants to expand its military ties with regional powers. On the vaccination front, to Serbia alone China supplied 1 million doses of the Chinese-produced Sinopharm vaccine, and the supply of an additional 2 million doses has also been agreed. However, China is also bringing highly questionable labor and environmental standards to the region.

The United States has already shown itself capable of pushing back against Russia and China in the Balkans, even under Trump. Montenegro joined NATO in 2017 and North Macedonia followed in 2020. In 2017 and 2018, U.S. diplomatic interventions helped resolve the political crises in Albania and North Macedonia, showing that Washington can succeed where the slow bureaucratic policy of the European Union fails. With respect to Chinese influence, the White House agreement on economic normalization between Kosovo and Serbia brokered by Trump stipulates that the two countries will not allow 5G infrastructure from “untrusted vendors,” an apparent jab at the Chinese tech giant Huawei. As a result, Serbia postponed the tender for the 5G spectrum. The Trump administration also persuaded Bulgaria, Kosovo, and North Macedonia to join its “Clean Network” initiative to eliminate China and Huawei from the global 5G infrastructure. The general mood is that Biden can finally close the doors to both Russia and China.

Not So Fast

It is too early for optimism, though. The Biden administration cannot expect a quick resolution of the Kosovo dispute, particularly if it involves Belgrade’s recognition of Kosovo. Any Serbian leader who recognizes Kosovo will be committing political suicide, particularly without face-saving concessions from Kosovo, the United States, or European Union. Pressure on Serbia from Biden himself to recognize Kosovo would be an even tougher sell, as he is highly unpopular in Serbia over his pro-interventionist stance from the 1990s. While Biden, in a 2016 visit, offered condolences to the families of Serbs killed in the NATO intervention of 1999, his track record of supporting Kosovo will not be soon forgotten.

Opposition to recognizing Kosovo enjoys considerable support across the political spectrum in Serbia. Any attempt to publicly pressure the country to recognize Kosovo will likely backfire and present an opening for Russia to increase its influence in Belgrade. Biden’s letter calling for recognition will make it harder for Serbia to compromise. Even if Serbia’s liberal political parties were to come to power at some point, the current opposition would have trouble compromising on Kosovo because of the potential domestic backlash from nationalists. One should not forget that there is also a nationalist opposition that could be even tougher than Vučić.

The situation is also complicated on the Kosovo side, as the new government of Albin Kurti, just like its Serbian counterparts, is not showing a willingness to compromise and does not deem the dialogue important in light of domestic hardships in Kosovo. According to polls, Kosovo citizens consider the dialogue with Serbia as the sixth or seventh issue of importance. Moreover, despite Biden’s and the America’s historical popularity among Kosovo Albanians, Kurti’s populist inclinations might hinder the relationship with Biden. The episode where Kurti refused to lift tariffs against Serbia, prompting Trump to encourage a no-confidence vote, shows that even U.S. leverage with Priština has limits.

The Biden administration has some options to promote democracy and human rights in the Balkans, but none of them are easy or clear cut. For instance, Washington might focus its diplomatic attention on Serbia. Would it not be easy to sever ties with Vučić and extend support to the opposition and civil society? Not exactly. Given Biden’s unpopularity in Serbia, any group or leader who gets U.S. backing would be an easy target for the government propaganda machine. Media attacks and pressure against civil society organizations, opposition figures, and journalists are a recurring theme already. For example, Serbian Minister of Interior Aleksandar Vulin reacted to the State Department’s human rights report with accusations of hypocrisy against the United States. Moreover, the opposition is disunified and unable to animate voters. Most of the opposition leaders have already been in power, like former Mayor of Belgrade Dragan Đilas and former Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremić.

Washington’s considerable influence in the Balkans has limits. The use of America’s most potent tool — secondary financial sanctions — would not instill pro-Western sentiments in the local elites and local population. In addition, some inroads from Russia and China in the Balkans will be hard to roll back. The region imports gas from Russia because there is no alternative. Chinese infrastructure lending is attractive because the funds of the European Union are not available. Russian and Chinese vaccines are being bought because the European Union failed to provide them in time. To increase its regional influence, the United States will have to offer both sticks and carrots to local stakeholders. Historically, Washington has been much more comfortable offering sticks. Transition politics may also make things more difficult for the United States. The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, whose regional office for the Western Balkans was opened in Belgrade by the Trump administration to encourage investments and trade, dismissed the office’s director, John Jovanovic, Trump’s appointee, upon the arrival of Biden, sending a wrong signal to Belgrade. Without a counteroffer, Serbia and the Balkans will not close the door to Russia and China.

Where to Go from Here

What should the Biden administration do in the Balkans? On Kosovo, it should leave the central mediating role to the European Union, to avoid sowing diplomatic confusion and to show respect to the Europeans by acknowledging that the region is Europe’s backyard. Washington should still use its political and diplomatic influence with the Serbian and Albanian side to ensure that negotiations are conducted in good faith and not as a platform for mutual political provocations. More importantly, Washington should avoid setting deadlines and expectations for the final agreement. Instead, with the European Union, it should place the focus on issues that affect the lives of ordinary citizens, both Serbs and Albanians. The United States should concentrate on issues like trade, development, corruption, human and minority rights, the status of Serbian cultural and religious sites, property of individuals and private entities, missing persons, and establishing a visa-free regime for Kosovo citizens. This approach will not yield quick results, but it will pave the path for a breakthrough in the future.

On the issue of democracy, the United States should avoid overtly taking sides in the Balkans’ messy domestic partisan politics. Nevertheless, in places like Serbia, Washington can help level the playing field by intervening diplomatically to ensure media freedoms and equal media coverage for the opposition. By doing so, the United States can ensure that the rules of the game equally apply to all contest participants but without backing any one of the Serbian parties or leaders, as in the case of its support of the anti-Milošević opposition. However, it should do so quietly to avoid becoming an easy scapegoat for the local elites.

To blunt Chinese and Russian influence in the Balkans, the United States needs to work with the European Union. With its proximity to the Balkans, economic influence, and competencies in governance and democracy promotion, the European Union has the ability to make lasting change in the region. The United States can exercise pressure on those leaders in the Balkans who want to play the West and East against each other, but it is the European Union that has to provide the alternative to collaborating with non-Western powers. The United States and the European Union should mobilize their financial resources and offer the governments and citizens projects that matter to them, like infrastructure, health, and the environment. These policy prescriptions may be slow and unsatisfactory for those hoping that the Biden administration will bring swift solutions and ultimate closure of the Balkans chapter. However, gradual but consistent progress sure beats the disappointments of the last several years.

Vuk Vuksanovic is a Ph.D. researcher in international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), an associate of LSE IDEAS, LSE’s foreign policy think tank, and a researcher at the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy. This piece is derived from analysis he authored for BCSP within the project “A real say on Serbian-American Relations,” supported by the U.S. Embassy in Serbia.

Image: White House (Photo by David Lienemann)

 

nationalinterest.org

Hitler Invaded Yugoslavia instead of Russia. This Mistake Cost Him Dearly

by Warfare History Network

9-11 minutes

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Here's What You Need to Remember: The last Yugoslavian casualty of the invasion did not die until 1970. He was the sad, boozebloated shell of the trim young man who, for a brief moment, had been the hope and idol of at least part of his country, King Peter II.

It was the most exciting scene Associated Press correspondent Robert St. John had yet witnessed in the career he had abandoned for five years to farm in New Hampshire then returned to when he sensed that war was coming.

It was March 27, 1941, and Terrazia, the Times Square of Belgrade, capital of what was then Yugoslavia, was packed with crowds jubilant at their country’s sudden stunning, defiance of Adolf Hitler. The mood quickly turned to anger, though, directed at St. John when he began to get down to his job of reporting.

“If I wanted to photograph these scenes I must be a Nazi agent gathering evidence, trying to get onto film the faces of those responsible, so they could be punished in true Nazi style when and if Hitler got this country under his thumb again,” he recalled. “That was the way they seemed to figure it.”

Early in his journalism career in notorious Cicero, Illinois, the town owned by Al Capone, St. John had been set upon by thugs and left for dead in a ditch. Understandably anxious to avoid a repetition, he waved his passport and a small American flag; the fickle crowd turned to ransacking the tourist agency of Hitler’s ally Italy while he took the opportunity to hotfoot it from the square.

Just 10 days later St. John would be back in Terrazia Square to witness a very different, tragic scene before running again—this time right out of the country before one of World War II’s briefest but most brutal blitzkriegs, the effects of which would be felt to the end of the 20th century. Yet another American, a female member of a distinguished political-military family, would also be on the run—not from danger but deliberately heading straight into it with near fatal results.

Yugoslavia was the makeshift attempt after World War I to bring the lands and people of the southeastern Balkans, formerly part of the Austro-Hungarian empire of the Hapsburgs, under the rule of the royal house of Serbia. But, it turned out, union did not mean unity. Almost a dozen nationalities and ethnic groups seethed with resentment, none more so than the largest among them, the Croats.

The political powder keg finally exploded in 1929 when a member of a different national group gunned down three Croatian deputies during a riotous session of Parliament. Arguing he needed to act to prevent civil war and secession, Serbian King Alexander I moved swiftly to establish a dictatorship.

The response by Croatian extremists out for independence was to found a terrorist group, the Ustachi, which engineered the king’s assassination in France in October 1934.

With his heir Peter II just 11, a cousin, Prince Paul, assumed a regency. The result was power without leadership. The prince, a cultured figure with little interest in or much aptitude for politics, made no secret he was just marking time until he could hand responsibility to the king on his 18th birthday in September, 1941.

Unhappily for the prince and tragically for Yugoslavia, Adolf Hitler would not wait. Preparing for his invasion of Greece, Hitler put relentless pressure on the nations of the Balkans to sign his de facto alliance, the Tri-Partite Pact. Robert St. John found himself rushing from capital to capital: “Weeks of ‘Will they? Won’t they?’ Weeks of dope stories based on the slimmest of chancellery gossip. Weeks of writing two or three long dispatches a day trying to keep the story alive while we waited for the inevitable to happen.”

Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania fell into line, and St. John found himself waiting in Belgrade for Yugoslavia’s turn to fold. Also observing events anxiously there was the other American, the woman of distinguished family, determined to do more about events than merely report on them.

Ruth Mitchell was the daughter of a one-time United States Senator from Wisconsin and the sister of General Billy Mitchell. A journalist herself, she accepted the fateful assignment of covering the comic-opera wedding of Albania’s outlandish King Zog I in 1938. “If I had known then what was coming,” she would reflect after the end of her ordeal, “would I have turned back? The answer is a completely certain No!”

Intending to stay just a few days for her story, she instead became so intrigued by Albania that she gave up her career to stay and study it. Driven out by the Italian invasion in early 1939, she then moved to Yugoslavia. There she became enthralled by Serbian history and culture. “The Serbs,” she was to write, “are a very small race; there were before the war not more than eight million of them. But it is a race of strikingly individual character, of extraordinary tenacity of purpose and ideal. That ideal can be expressed in a single word: Freedom.”

With the same uncompromising intensity for a cause and personal flamboyance that had cost brother Billy his military career due to his vocal advocacy of military aviation in the United States, she went so far as to enlist in the legendary Serbian Chetnik militia, complete with fur hat, skull and crossbones emblem, uniform, boots, dagger, and poison pill in case of capture.

“The soul of Serbia on the march! I was a Chetnik—until death,” she exulted.

For his part, though, Robert St. John was skeptical. “It seemed to me that Miss Mitchell was just looking for some Hollywood adventure. Well, I thought, she’ll probably get all she wants before long.”

Foreign Minister Aleksander Cincar-Markovic, then Prime Minister Dragisa Cvetkovic, and finally Prince Paul himself got the feared summons to meet Hitler at Berchtesgaden. “Fear reigned,” Churchill would record. “The Ministers and the leading politicians did not dare to speak their minds. There was one exception. An Air Force general named Simovic represented the nationalist elements among the officer corps of the armed forces. Since December his office had become a clandestine center of opposition to German penetration into the Balkans and to the inertia of the Yugoslav government.”

Serbian public opinion, remembering their support during World War I and afterward for independence, was overwhelmingly pro-British. “I am out of my head!” Prince Paul bewailed under the strain. After a second visit to Hitler and the assurance—for what it was worth— that all that was wanted was his signature, the prince finally sent Prime Minister Cvetkovic and Foreign Minister Cincar-Markovic to sign the Tri-Partite Pact in Vienna on March 25, 1941. To the protesting minister from the United States, Prince Paul replied bitterly, “You big nations are hard. You talk of honor, but you are far away.”

Ruth Mitchell’s Serbian friends visited, anguished and humiliated at what they considered the betrayal of a friend. “We had written our capitulation stories, packed our bags, and argued over where the next crisis was likely to break out,” St. John later wrote. “But then something happened that forced us to unlimber our typewriters, dig copy paper out of our suitcases, and get to work in Belgrade again.”

Prince Paul had warned Hitler that if he signed the pact he would not last another six months in power. He would be off in his calculations by five months and 28 days.

The day after the signing, demonstrations, started by students, erupted on the streets of Belgrade. As he watched, a secret policeman next to St. John remarked, “You newspaper boys better keep your pencils sharp. Things are going to happen in Yugoslavia yet!”

At 2:30 the next morning, St. John was awakened by a phone call from a colleague who informed him that troops and tanks were in the streets. Rushing out, he was soon led under guard to a park to join prostitutes, cleaning women, and other night-crawlers.

“We were watching the unfolding of a first class, full-dress coup d’etat,” he recognized.

Without a shot, government buildings were occupied and ministers arrested at their homes. At the palace, the guards opened the gates to the rebels without resistance while young King Peter II climbed down a drainpipe to join them. Soon, General Simovic, the leader of the revolt, arrived to announce, “Your Majesty, I salute you as King of Yugoslavia. From this moment you will exercise your full sovereign power.”

Prince Paul had been heading to his country estate for a badly needed rest. He would get a longer one. His train was intercepted and rerouted back to Belgrade. Under guard, he was then trooped into the office of the new prime minister, General Simovic, to sign his resignation. He finally reboarded his train with many of his ministers for a new destination, Greece. They were luckier than they knew. Ruth Mitchell had been tipped that the Chetniks were launching their own coup, which intended to leave none of them alive. Foreign Minister Cincar-Markovic was one the few kept on in the new regime, with a personally tragic consequence.

 

rs.n1info.com

SPS leader Dacic blasts RTS series on Milosevic

Author:Beta

2 minutes

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Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) leader Ivica Dacic said on Friday that the state TV (RTS) series on the arrest of Slobodan Milosevic is “an abuse of one family’s tragedy for the personal promotion of the people involved”.

Milosevic was leader of the SPS during the 1990s and was arrested following a popular uprising in March 2001 on charges of embezzlement and corruption and was later extradited to the Hague Tribunal to stand trial on charges of war crimes. He died of natural causes in the tribunal detention unit. The five-part series Family covers the days leading up to his arrest. It is being aired in a prime time slot every evening of this week.

Dacic, currently serving as Parliament Speaker, said the series should have been about how Milosevic was tricked. “The people who arrested him should be in jail because they tricked him, signed guarantees,” the former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister said on the RTS morning show, adding that “mice arrested Milosevic”. Mice is a slang term used mainly by criminal circles in Serbia to denote anyone considered unworthy.

He asked how the state TV and Telekom could use public money to finance the series. “History will show who was right… It imposes the theory that Milosevic was to blame for everything, for genocide, the wars, bombings,” Dacic said.

 

The Spectator - Europe's panic: the meltdown over vaccines

Matthew Lynn

 

Europe’s panic: the meltdown over vaccines

From magazine issue: 27 March 2021

 

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The Dutch city of Leiden has rarely played a dramatic role in European history. Quiet, rainy and tucked away close to the sea, it is in many ways the Durham of the Continent. It was besieged by the Spanish in the Eighty Years’ War, Rembrandt was born and worked there, Einstein taught intermittently at its university — and that is about it. Yet this week Leiden is at the centre of European politics, and in a way that almost no one could have expected.

In the city’s science park, the biotech company Halix has a crucial role in manufacturing the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine. The European Union threatened to seize control of the plant, demanding that all its output be diverted from Britain to the Continent. If this happens, despite a seeming truce on Wednesday evening, it will be the moment at which the global vaccine wars that have been simmering for the past few months turn, in the language of military strategists, from cold to hot.

And yet beyond the day-to-day drama of which country gets which vaccine first, there is a bigger, more significant story playing out. The EU is in a blind panic as its jabs catastrophe gets worse and worse. What started out as a pharmaceutical crisis is rapidly turning into a series of far bigger public health, economic and political disasters.

This week’s summit of the bloc’s leaders, which aimed to get Europe’s vaccination programme back on track, instead showed how badly it has gone wrong. Britain has vaccinated more than half its adult population, and the United States is close to 40 per cent. Both countries have been rewarded with rapidly falling numbers of infections, hospital admissions and deaths. But EU countries lag far behind. In France, Germany, Italy and Spain, less than 15 per cent of their adult populations have been jabbed.

The EU’s vaccine campaign has been made up of blunders that would be almost comic, were the medical emergency not so serious. An obscure Cypriot party hack, appointed Health Commissioner, was put in charge of the procurement programme, too little money was spent, the focus was on the wrong risks, authorisation was too slow and, to cap it all, many of the EU’s leaders then undermined public faith in the one vaccine — the Oxford — that was going to save them. Last weekend, France and Germany hardly vaccinated anyone. The response? Amid a shortage of supplies that is completely its own fault, the EU is resorting to export controls and bans. A shipment of 250,000 doses to Australia has already been stopped, and exports to the UK were next in line. On Wednesday, the UK and the EU pulled back from the brink of an all-out trade war, pledging to work together to increase the supply for everyone. But that came after Italian police had seized 29 million AstraZeneca doses they suspected might be bound for Britain. With that kind of tension still in the air, any truce is likely to be a fragile one.

On the surface, it is hard to understand why the EU is resorting to such extreme measures. According to the consultancy firm Airfinity, even if the EU does ban exports, it will gain only an extra week of supply, while the British will lose two months. The political and economic price will be high. The EU will trash its reputation as a place in which to do business. Why base a plant in somewhere such as Leiden if the authorities will seize control of production lines whenever it is convenient? If these contracts get overridden by bureaucratic fiat, then so can any other agreement. (After all, if the AstraZeneca deal with the EU was legally binding, the company would have been hauled before a judge in Brussels by now.) The EU risks turning itself into a pirate state, for very little gain, which helps explain why smaller countries that depend on multinational investment, such as Ireland, have become nervous. Blind panic is the only explanation that makes sense.

The EU now faces three colliding crises. First, and most obviously, there is an unfolding public health disaster. A third wave of Covid-19, driven by mutations from Brazil, South Africa and Kent, is hitting an unvaccinated population. ICU units in northern Italy and Paris risk being overwhelmed again. Much of France has gone back into lockdown, and so has Italy, while Germany will close down shops over the Easter break in an attempt to control the spread of the virus. While the UK, the US and Israel are finally coming out of the crisis, the EU is going back into it, with nothing to show for the past year of hardship. As long as the virus circulates, there is no guarantee it can get out of the mess. Brazil has shown that without vaccines, countries can simply get hit by wave after wave.

 

Written byMatthew Lynn

Matthew Lynn is a financial columnist and author of ‘Bust: Greece, The Euro and The Sovereign Debt Crisis’ and ‘The Long Depression: The Slump of 2008 to 2031’

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/europes-panic-the-meltdown-over-vaccines

strategic-culture.org

Cultural Deafness Defines the West

Alastair Crooke

28-35 minutes

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February 15, 2021

© Photo: REUTERS/Tom Brenner

The élites come to believe their narrative – forgetting that it was conceived as an illusion created to capture the imagination within their society.

Pat Buchanan is absolutely right – that when it comes to insurrections, history depends on who writes the narrative. Usually that falls to the oligarchic class; (should they ultimately prevail.) Yet, I recall quite a few ‘terrorists’ who subsequently to were become widely-courted ‘statesmen’. So the wheel of passing time turns – and turns about, again.

Of course, fixing a narrative – an unchallengeable reality, that is perceived to be too secure, too highly invested to fail – does not mean it will not go unchallenged. There is an old British expression that well describes its’ colonial experience of (silent) challenge to its then dominant ‘narrative’ (both in Ireland and India inter alia). It was known as ‘dumb insolence’. That is, when the performance of individual acts of rebellion are both too costly personally and pointless, that the silent, sourly expression of dumb contempt for their ‘overlords’ says it all. It infuriated the British commanding class by its daily reminder of their legitimacy deficit. Gandhi took it to the heights. And it his narrative ultimately, that is the one better remembered in history.

With global Big Tech’s control of narrative, however, we have entered into an entirely different order of things, to those early British efforts at keeping down dissidence – as Harvard Business School Professor Shoshana Zuboff succinctly notes:

“Over the last two decades, I’ve observed the consequences of our surprising metamorphosis into surveillance empires powered by global architectures of behavioural monitoring, analysis, targeting and prediction – that I have called surveillance capitalism. On the strength of their surveillance capabilities and for the sake of their surveillance profits, the new empires engineered a fundamentally anti-democratic epistemic coup, marked by unprecedented concentrations of knowledge about us and the unaccountable power that accrues to such knowledge.”

Narrative control has now jumped the shark:

“This is the essence of the epistemic coup. They claim the authority to decide who knows … [and] which now vies with democracy over the fundamental rights and principles that will define our social order in this century. Will the growing recognition of this other coup … finally force us to reckon with the inconvenient truth that has loomed over the last two decades? We may have democracy, or we may have surveillance society, but we cannot have both.” (Emphasis added).

This clearly represents a quite different magnitude of ‘control’ – and when allied with the West’s counter-insurgency techniques of ‘terrorist’ narrative disruption, honed during the ‘Great War on Terrorism’ – is a formidable tool for curbing dissent domestically, as well as externally.

Yet it has a fundamental weakness.

Quite simply, that being so invested, so immersed, in one particular ‘reality’, others’ ‘truths’ then will not – cannot – be heard. They do not stand out proud above the endless flat plain of consensual discourse. They cannot penetrate the hardened shell of a prevailing narrative bubble, or claim the attention of élites so invested in managing their own version of reality.

The ‘Big Weakness’? The élites come to believe their own narratives – forgetting that the narrative was conceived as an illusion, one among others, created to capture the imagination within their society (not others’).

They lose the ability to stand apart, and see themselves – as others see them. They become so enraptured by the virtue of their version of the world, that they lose all ability to empathise or accept others’ truths. They cannot hear the signals. The point here, is that in that talking past (and not listening) to other states, the latters’ motives and intentions will be mis-construed – sometimes tragically so.

Examples are legion, but the Biden Administration’s perception that time was frozen – from the moment of Obama’s departure from office – and somehow defrosted on 20 January, just in time for Biden to pick up on that earlier era (as if time was uninterrupted), marks one example of a belief in one’s own meme. Whilst the EU’s unfeigned amazement – and anger – at being described ‘as an unreliable partner’ by FM Lavrov in Moscow, is just another example of how élites have become remote from the real world and captive to their own self-perception.

“America is back” to lead, and ‘to set the rules of the road’ for the rest of the world, may be intended to radiate U.S. strength, but rather, it suggests a tenuous grasp of the realities facing the U.S.: America’s relations with Europe and Asia were growing increasingly distant well before Biden entered the White House – and, therefore, from before Trump’s (purposefully disruptive) term, too.

Why then is the U.S. so consistently in denial about this?

On the one hand, after seven decades of global primacy, there is inevitably a certain inertia that would hinder any dominant power from registering and assimilating the significant changes of the recent past. However, for the U.S., another factor helps explain its’ ‘tin ear’: It is the wider Establishment’s fixation on preventing the 2020 presidential election from validating the previous one’s results. That really overrode all else. Nothing else mattered. The focus was so all-consuming it obscured notice of the world changing – right there – outside of their windows.

This is not unique to America. It is easy to understand why the EU was so blind-sided by FM Lavrov’s labelling of the EU as ‘unreliable partner’ (which it patently has been). As former Greek FM, Yanis Varoufakis has written from his own experience of trying to get the EU to listen to his detailed summaries and proposals in respect to his country’s financial crisis: ‘They (the Euro Group) just sat grim-faced, taking not one jot of notice: I might as well have sung the Swedish national anthem, for all the attention they gave to my contributions’, Varoufakis later related. His experience was standard EU modus operandi. The EU does not do ‘negotiation’. Supplicants, whether Greece or Britain, must accept EU values – and its ‘club house-rules’.

The High Representative Borrell, arrived with his long list of complaints, culled from 27 states (some of which have a historical list of complaints against Russia). He read the demands, and no doubt, expected Lavrov, like Varoufakis, to sit quietly, as he accepted the reprimands – and the ‘club rules’ appropriate to any aspirant contemplating some sort of working relationship with the worlds’ ‘biggest consumer market’. This is the EU culture.

And then, the following infamous press conference at which the EU was called ‘unreliable’. Anyone who has attended a EU decision-making making body, knows the protocol – but let a former EU high official describe it: The Council handles Chefsachen – the stuff of high politics, not low regulation – in closed sessions. At these, van Middelaar can report, all 28 heads of government (pre-Brexit) call each other by their first names, and may find themselves agreeing to decisions they had never even imagined beforehand – before emerging together for a beaming ‘family photograph’ in front of the cameras of the one thousand reporters assembled to hear their tidings, whose presence makes ‘failure impossible’, since every summit (with just one upsetting exception) ends with a message of common hope and resolve.

Lavrov, like some ‘rough-diamond’ distant family relative, didn’t know to behave in polite EU society; you don’t call the EU names. Oh no!

Varoufakis explains: “Unlike nation states that emerge as stabilisers of conflicts between social classes and groups, the EU was created as a cartel with a remit to stabilise the profit margins of the large, central European corporations. (It began life as the European Coal and Steel Community). “Seen through this prism, the EU’s stubborn faithfulness to failed practices begins to make sense. Cartels are reasonably good at distributing monopoly profits between oligarchs, but terrible at distributing losses”. We also know that, unlike proper states, cartels will resist any democratisation or outside input into their tight circle of decision-making.

This incident in Moscow might all be faintly amusing, except for the fact that it underlines how Brussels’ navel-gazing (in a separate way to that of Team Biden), produces a similar result: It becomes out of touch with the world beyond. It ‘listens’, but does not hear. The West’s hostile strategy to Russia, as Pepe Escobar has observed in his strategic analysis of Russia’s position, is conditioned on the notion that Russia has nowhere else to go – and therefore must feel pleased and honoured by the notion of the EU condescending to push-out an ‘octopus tentacle’ towards Eurasia. Whereas, now, with the centre of geo-economic gravity shifting to China and East Asia, it is realistically more a question of whether the Greater Eurasian heartland, with its 2.2 billion population, feels it worthwhile to extend its tentacle out towards the rule-bound EU.

This is no small matter: The EU having a hissy-fit over Lavrov’s put-down of the EU in Moscow is one thing. The potential however, for the U.S. to listen, but not hear, on Russia and China, is quite another. Mis-hearing, mis-conceiving these two states, touches on matters of war and peace.

Cultural Deafness Defines the West

The élites come to believe their narrative – forgetting that it was conceived as an illusion created to capture the imagination within their society.

Pat Buchanan is absolutely right – that when it comes to insurrections, history depends on who writes the narrative. Usually that falls to the oligarchic class; (should they ultimately prevail.) Yet, I recall quite a few ‘terrorists’ who subsequently to were become widely-courted ‘statesmen’. So the wheel of passing time turns – and turns about, again.

Of course, fixing a narrative – an unchallengeable reality, that is perceived to be too secure, too highly invested to fail – does not mean it will not go unchallenged. There is an old British expression that well describes its’ colonial experience of (silent) challenge to its then dominant ‘narrative’ (both in Ireland and India inter alia). It was known as ‘dumb insolence’. That is, when the performance of individual acts of rebellion are both too costly personally and pointless, that the silent, sourly expression of dumb contempt for their ‘overlords’ says it all. It infuriated the British commanding class by its daily reminder of their legitimacy deficit. Gandhi took it to the heights. And it his narrative ultimately, that is the one better remembered in history.

With global Big Tech’s control of narrative, however, we have entered into an entirely different order of things, to those early British efforts at keeping down dissidence – as Harvard Business School Professor Shoshana Zuboff succinctly notes:

“Over the last two decades, I’ve observed the consequences of our surprising metamorphosis into surveillance empires powered by global architectures of behavioural monitoring, analysis, targeting and prediction – that I have called surveillance capitalism. On the strength of their surveillance capabilities and for the sake of their surveillance profits, the new empires engineered a fundamentally anti-democratic epistemic coup, marked by unprecedented concentrations of knowledge about us and the unaccountable power that accrues to such knowledge.”

Narrative control has now jumped the shark:

“This is the essence of the epistemic coup. They claim the authority to decide who knows … [and] which now vies with democracy over the fundamental rights and principles that will define our social order in this century. Will the growing recognition of this other coup … finally force us to reckon with the inconvenient truth that has loomed over the last two decades? We may have democracy, or we may have surveillance society, but we cannot have both.” (Emphasis added).

This clearly represents a quite different magnitude of ‘control’ – and when allied with the West’s counter-insurgency techniques of ‘terrorist’ narrative disruption, honed during the ‘Great War on Terrorism’ – is a formidable tool for curbing dissent domestically, as well as externally.

Yet it has a fundamental weakness.

Quite simply, that being so invested, so immersed, in one particular ‘reality’, others’ ‘truths’ then will not – cannot – be heard. They do not stand out proud above the endless flat plain of consensual discourse. They cannot penetrate the hardened shell of a prevailing narrative bubble, or claim the attention of élites so invested in managing their own version of reality.

The ‘Big Weakness’? The élites come to believe their own narratives – forgetting that the narrative was conceived as an illusion, one among others, created to capture the imagination within their society (not others’).

They lose the ability to stand apart, and see themselves – as others see them. They become so enraptured by the virtue of their version of the world, that they lose all ability to empathise or accept others’ truths. They cannot hear the signals. The point here, is that in that talking past (and not listening) to other states, the latters’ motives and intentions will be mis-construed – sometimes tragically so.

Examples are legion, but the Biden Administration’s perception that time was frozen – from the moment of Obama’s departure from office – and somehow defrosted on 20 January, just in time for Biden to pick up on that earlier era (as if time was uninterrupted), marks one example of a belief in one’s own meme. Whilst the EU’s unfeigned amazement – and anger – at being described ‘as an unreliable partner’ by FM Lavrov in Moscow, is just another example of how élites have become remote from the real world and captive to their own self-perception.

“America is back” to lead, and ‘to set the rules of the road’ for the rest of the world, may be intended to radiate U.S. strength, but rather, it suggests a tenuous grasp of the realities facing the U.S.: America’s relations with Europe and Asia were growing increasingly distant well before Biden entered the White House – and, therefore, from before Trump’s (purposefully disruptive) term, too.

Why then is the U.S. so consistently in denial about this?

On the one hand, after seven decades of global primacy, there is inevitably a certain inertia that would hinder any dominant power from registering and assimilating the significant changes of the recent past. However, for the U.S., another factor helps explain its’ ‘tin ear’: It is the wider Establishment’s fixation on preventing the 2020 presidential election from validating the previous one’s results. That really overrode all else. Nothing else mattered. The focus was so all-consuming it obscured notice of the world changing – right there – outside of their windows.

This is not unique to America. It is easy to understand why the EU was so blind-sided by FM Lavrov’s labelling of the EU as ‘unreliable partner’ (which it patently has been). As former Greek FM, Yanis Varoufakis has written from his own experience of trying to get the EU to listen to his detailed summaries and proposals in respect to his country’s financial crisis: ‘They (the Euro Group) just sat grim-faced, taking not one jot of notice: I might as well have sung the Swedish national anthem, for all the attention they gave to my contributions’, Varoufakis later related. His experience was standard EU modus operandi. The EU does not do ‘negotiation’. Supplicants, whether Greece or Britain, must accept EU values – and its ‘club house-rules’.

The High Representative Borrell, arrived with his long list of complaints, culled from 27 states (some of which have a historical list of complaints against Russia). He read the demands, and no doubt, expected Lavrov, like Varoufakis, to sit quietly, as he accepted the reprimands – and the ‘club rules’ appropriate to any aspirant contemplating some sort of working relationship with the worlds’ ‘biggest consumer market’. This is the EU culture.

And then, the following infamous press conference at which the EU was called ‘unreliable’. Anyone who has attended a EU decision-making making body, knows the protocol – but let a former EU high official describe it: The Council handles Chefsachen – the stuff of high politics, not low regulation – in closed sessions. At these, van Middelaar can report, all 28 heads of government (pre-Brexit) call each other by their first names, and may find themselves agreeing to decisions they had never even imagined beforehand – before emerging together for a beaming ‘family photograph’ in front of the cameras of the one thousand reporters assembled to hear their tidings, whose presence makes ‘failure impossible’, since every summit (with just one upsetting exception) ends with a message of common hope and resolve.

Lavrov, like some ‘rough-diamond’ distant family relative, didn’t know to behave in polite EU society; you don’t call the EU names. Oh no!

Varoufakis explains: “Unlike nation states that emerge as stabilisers of conflicts between social classes and groups, the EU was created as a cartel with a remit to stabilise the profit margins of the large, central European corporations. (It began life as the European Coal and Steel Community). “Seen through this prism, the EU’s stubborn faithfulness to failed practices begins to make sense. Cartels are reasonably good at distributing monopoly profits between oligarchs, but terrible at distributing losses”. We also know that, unlike proper states, cartels will resist any democratisation or outside input into their tight circle of decision-making.

This incident in Moscow might all be faintly amusing, except for the fact that it underlines how Brussels’ navel-gazing (in a separate way to that of Team Biden), produces a similar result: It becomes out of touch with the world beyond. It ‘listens’, but does not hear. The West’s hostile strategy to Russia, as Pepe Escobar has observed in his strategic analysis of Russia’s position, is conditioned on the notion that Russia has nowhere else to go – and therefore must feel pleased and honoured by the notion of the EU condescending to push-out an ‘octopus tentacle’ towards Eurasia. Whereas, now, with the centre of geo-economic gravity shifting to China and East Asia, it is realistically more a question of whether the Greater Eurasian heartland, with its 2.2 billion population, feels it worthwhile to extend its tentacle out towards the rule-bound EU.

This is no small matter: The EU having a hissy-fit over Lavrov’s put-down of the EU in Moscow is one thing. The potential however, for the U.S. to listen, but not hear, on Russia and China, is quite another. Mis-hearing, mis-conceiving these two states, touches on matters of war and peace.

The élites come to believe their narrative – forgetting that it was conceived as an illusion created to capture the imagination within their society.

Pat Buchanan is absolutely right – that when it comes to insurrections, history depends on who writes the narrative. Usually that falls to the oligarchic class; (should they ultimately prevail.) Yet, I recall quite a few ‘terrorists’ who subsequently to were become widely-courted ‘statesmen’. So the wheel of passing time turns – and turns about, again.

Of course, fixing a narrative – an unchallengeable reality, that is perceived to be too secure, too highly invested to fail – does not mean it will not go unchallenged. There is an old British expression that well describes its’ colonial experience of (silent) challenge to its then dominant ‘narrative’ (both in Ireland and India inter alia). It was known as ‘dumb insolence’. That is, when the performance of individual acts of rebellion are both too costly personally and pointless, that the silent, sourly expression of dumb contempt for their ‘overlords’ says it all. It infuriated the British commanding class by its daily reminder of their legitimacy deficit. Gandhi took it to the heights. And it his narrative ultimately, that is the one better remembered in history.

With global Big Tech’s control of narrative, however, we have entered into an entirely different order of things, to those early British efforts at keeping down dissidence – as Harvard Business School Professor Shoshana Zuboff succinctly notes:

“Over the last two decades, I’ve observed the consequences of our surprising metamorphosis into surveillance empires powered by global architectures of behavioural monitoring, analysis, targeting and prediction – that I have called surveillance capitalism. On the strength of their surveillance capabilities and for the sake of their surveillance profits, the new empires engineered a fundamentally anti-democratic epistemic coup, marked by unprecedented concentrations of knowledge about us and the unaccountable power that accrues to such knowledge.”

Narrative control has now jumped the shark:

“This is the essence of the epistemic coup. They claim the authority to decide who knows … [and] which now vies with democracy over the fundamental rights and principles that will define our social order in this century. Will the growing recognition of this other coup … finally force us to reckon with the inconvenient truth that has loomed over the last two decades? We may have democracy, or we may have surveillance society, but we cannot have both.” (Emphasis added).

This clearly represents a quite different magnitude of ‘control’ – and when allied with the West’s counter-insurgency techniques of ‘terrorist’ narrative disruption, honed during the ‘Great War on Terrorism’ – is a formidable tool for curbing dissent domestically, as well as externally.

Yet it has a fundamental weakness.

Quite simply, that being so invested, so immersed, in one particular ‘reality’, others’ ‘truths’ then will not – cannot – be heard. They do not stand out proud above the endless flat plain of consensual discourse. They cannot penetrate the hardened shell of a prevailing narrative bubble, or claim the attention of élites so invested in managing their own version of reality.

The ‘Big Weakness’? The élites come to believe their own narratives – forgetting that the narrative was conceived as an illusion, one among others, created to capture the imagination within their society (not others’).

They lose the ability to stand apart, and see themselves – as others see them. They become so enraptured by the virtue of their version of the world, that they lose all ability to empathise or accept others’ truths. They cannot hear the signals. The point here, is that in that talking past (and not listening) to other states, the latters’ motives and intentions will be mis-construed – sometimes tragically so.

Examples are legion, but the Biden Administration’s perception that time was frozen – from the moment of Obama’s departure from office – and somehow defrosted on 20 January, just in time for Biden to pick up on that earlier era (as if time was uninterrupted), marks one example of a belief in one’s own meme. Whilst the EU’s unfeigned amazement – and anger – at being described ‘as an unreliable partner’ by FM Lavrov in Moscow, is just another example of how élites have become remote from the real world and captive to their own self-perception.

“America is back” to lead, and ‘to set the rules of the road’ for the rest of the world, may be intended to radiate U.S. strength, but rather, it suggests a tenuous grasp of the realities facing the U.S.: America’s relations with Europe and Asia were growing increasingly distant well before Biden entered the White House – and, therefore, from before Trump’s (purposefully disruptive) term, too.

Why then is the U.S. so consistently in denial about this?

On the one hand, after seven decades of global primacy, there is inevitably a certain inertia that would hinder any dominant power from registering and assimilating the significant changes of the recent past. However, for the U.S., another factor helps explain its’ ‘tin ear’: It is the wider Establishment’s fixation on preventing the 2020 presidential election from validating the previous one’s results. That really overrode all else. Nothing else mattered. The focus was so all-consuming it obscured notice of the world changing – right there – outside of their windows.

This is not unique to America. It is easy to understand why the EU was so blind-sided by FM Lavrov’s labelling of the EU as ‘unreliable partner’ (which it patently has been). As former Greek FM, Yanis Varoufakis has written from his own experience of trying to get the EU to listen to his detailed summaries and proposals in respect to his country’s financial crisis: ‘They (the Euro Group) just sat grim-faced, taking not one jot of notice: I might as well have sung the Swedish national anthem, for all the attention they gave to my contributions’, Varoufakis later related. His experience was standard EU modus operandi. The EU does not do ‘negotiation’. Supplicants, whether Greece or Britain, must accept EU values – and its ‘club house-rules’.

The High Representative Borrell, arrived with his long list of complaints, culled from 27 states (some of which have a historical list of complaints against Russia). He read the demands, and no doubt, expected Lavrov, like Varoufakis, to sit quietly, as he accepted the reprimands – and the ‘club rules’ appropriate to any aspirant contemplating some sort of working relationship with the worlds’ ‘biggest consumer market’. This is the EU culture.

And then, the following infamous press conference at which the EU was called ‘unreliable’. Anyone who has attended a EU decision-making making body, knows the protocol – but let a former EU high official describe it: The Council handles Chefsachen – the stuff of high politics, not low regulation – in closed sessions. At these, van Middelaar can report, all 28 heads of government (pre-Brexit) call each other by their first names, and may find themselves agreeing to decisions they had never even imagined beforehand – before emerging together for a beaming ‘family photograph’ in front of the cameras of the one thousand reporters assembled to hear their tidings, whose presence makes ‘failure impossible’, since every summit (with just one upsetting exception) ends with a message of common hope and resolve.

Lavrov, like some ‘rough-diamond’ distant family relative, didn’t know to behave in polite EU society; you don’t call the EU names. Oh no!

Varoufakis explains: “Unlike nation states that emerge as stabilisers of conflicts between social classes and groups, the EU was created as a cartel with a remit to stabilise the profit margins of the large, central European corporations. (It began life as the European Coal and Steel Community). “Seen through this prism, the EU’s stubborn faithfulness to failed practices begins to make sense. Cartels are reasonably good at distributing monopoly profits between oligarchs, but terrible at distributing losses”. We also know that, unlike proper states, cartels will resist any democratisation or outside input into their tight circle of decision-making.

This incident in Moscow might all be faintly amusing, except for the fact that it underlines how Brussels’ navel-gazing (in a separate way to that of Team Biden), produces a similar result: It becomes out of touch with the world beyond. It ‘listens’, but does not hear. The West’s hostile strategy to Russia, as Pepe Escobar has observed in his strategic analysis of Russia’s position, is conditioned on the notion that Russia has nowhere else to go – and therefore must feel pleased and honoured by the notion of the EU condescending to push-out an ‘octopus tentacle’ towards Eurasia. Whereas, now, with the centre of geo-economic gravity shifting to China and East Asia, it is realistically more a question of whether the Greater Eurasian heartland, with its 2.2 billion population, feels it worthwhile to extend its tentacle out towards the rule-bound EU.

This is no small matter: The EU having a hissy-fit over Lavrov’s put-down of the EU in Moscow is one thing. The potential however, for the U.S. to listen, but not hear, on Russia and China, is quite another. Mis-hearing, mis-conceiving these two states, touches on matters of war and peace.

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

Print this article

Alastair Crooke

Former British diplomat, founder and director of the Beirut-based Conflicts Forum.

 

Daniel Serwer: What Kosovo needs now is not only recognition from Serbia

dtt-net.com

[Opinion ] What Kosovo needs now is not only recognition from Serbia

5-6 minutes

---

By Daniel Serwer

Washington/Prishtina, dtt-net.com - Kosovo's early elections have produced, as expected, a clear victory for Vetevendosje (VV or "Self-Determination"). According to preliminary results, it has won close to 48% and a commanding lead of something over 50 seats in the 120-seata Kosovo Assembly.

This is Albin Kurti's moment. The still young, articulate VV leader had a couple of months in the Prime Minister's chair last year. The Trump Administration didn't like his insistence on reciprocity with Serbia or his skepticism about Trump's bizarre choice of an American envoy. Washington took advantage of a squabble within his coalition to bring him down. That isn't likely this time around, not only because of VV's strong showing at the polls but also because Trump is gone. The Biden Administration will at least try to be respectful of Kosovo's democracy.

That however won't save Albin from a bigger challenge: constructing the kind of majority in parliament that will enable election of a new president as well as a strong position in negotiations with Serbia. Both in practice require a two-thirds majority. Part of the difference will come from ethnic minority parties, but at least one more Albanian-based party will be needed. Two obvious candidates both have a bad history with VV: the LDK, running a poor third in yesterday's election, brought down Albin's short-lived coalition last year and VV has been a stern critic of the second-place Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK), in particular its now-indicted former President Hashim Thaci. Ramush Haradinaj's Alliance for the Future of Kosovo (AAK) will not have enough seats to get VV to two-thirds, but it would be step in that direction.

 Kosovo's parliamentary system has often produced long inter-regna. Albin could cut this one short by acting unilaterally, but that might make forming the necessary coalition later more difficult rather than less. Negotiations with Serbia and electing a new president will not be top priorities for VV. Albin would prefer to focus on his campaign priorities: jobs and justice. That will not be easy, as Covid-19 has hit the Kosovo economy hard and reform of the justice system is a long-term project. The Americans and Europeans will be trying to get Pristina to engage as soon as possible on the dialogue with Belgrade, which faces presidential and likely parliamentary elections by April 2022 (and possibly earlier). No serious negotiations with Serbia will be possible after the end of this year.

 Though the EU aims at it, there is little prospect of a "final" agreement within that timeframe. Serbian President Vucic has made eminently clear he will not recognize Kosovo before his re-election, if then. Some interim confidence-building steps might be possible, focused on missing people from the 1999 war and implementation of the several dozen existing agreements between Belgrade and Pristina, few of which have been executed to the satisfaction of both capitals. In any event, Pristina will need to be ready to walk away from a bad agreement in order to get a good one. Albin would do well to match Vucic's reluctance.

 A more comprehensive agreement is however needed. Serbia's refusal to recognize its erstwhile "autonomous province" leaves Kosovo in international limbo with unclear and unmarked borders, enabling Serbia to undermine its statehood, territorial integrity, and sovereignty. But it also leaves Serbia without the "good neighborly relations" required for EU membership. The two capitals would do well to contemplate seriously the much-mentioned German/German solution, which entailed UN membership for the German Democratic Republic as well as ambassadorial-level representation in both capitals but no formal recognition. No one who knows Kosovo would expect the longer-term outcome to be like Germany's (i.e. re-incorporation of Kosovo into Serbia).

 If Kurti, either as leader of VV or prime minister, is even modestly successful in using the next couple of years to deliver on "jobs and justice," Kosovo will find itself in a far stronger position to negotiate successfully with Serbia. A stronger economy and a judicial system that can handle both inter-ethnic crime and high-level corruption would make both Washington and Brussels more unequivocal in their support. Success would also enable a stronger position on reciprocity with Belgrade. Albin Kurti has big shoes to fill: his own.

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(Daniel Serwer is professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and director of its Conflict Management and American Foreign Policy Programs, as well as a Scholar at the Middle East Institute. This opinion of his was first published at his blog: peacefare.net)

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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of dtt-net.com.

 

Srdja Trifkovic: The Woke-Enabling Act

chroniclesmagazine.org

The Woke-Enabling Act

By Srdja Trifkovic

5-7 minute

In the first week of September 1792 the French Revolution entered its openly terroristic phase with the massacre of some 1,600 prisoners in Paris. It was an outrage euphemistically called les Journées du Septembre (or the September Days). It was justified by the claim that the country was in danger from foreign enemies and domestic counter-revolutionaries. Most of the victims did not pose any threat, but their slaughter cemented the power of the murderous Jacobin cabal.

In August 1918, the Bolshevik revolution reached a critical juncture with the attempted assassination of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin by Fanny Kaplan. It was used to unleash a massive campaign of red terror, which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives of designated class enemies over the ensuing three years. It was the template for numerous subsequent terror campaigns by Communist regimes and movements in the USSR and other countries, most notably in China, which destroyed tens of millions of lives over the ensuing half-century.

On Jan. 30, 1933, against his better judgment, Germany's President Paul von Hindenburg—a conservative war hero—appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor. Initially Hitler headed a coalition government in which his National Socialists had only three ministerial posts. Four weeks later, an unhinged Dutch Communist started a fire that engulfed the Reichstag building. Whether the Nazis knew of the arsonist's intent and allowed him to proceed is still disputed. They used the event to rush through a sweeping piece of legislation, das Ermächtigungsgesetz (the Enabling Act), granting Hitler total dictatorial powers.

On Jan. 6, 2021, what happened in Washington, D.C., was a mostly peaceful protest—the term is fully applicable here for once—followed by a section of the crowd breaking into the Capitol building. An unarmed, white, female veteran with 14 years of service was killed by the police. The protesters were neither "far right" nor "neo-Nazi." They were overwhelmingly regular, patriotic Americans. Unlike in Seattle, Portland, and Minneapolis, there was no arson, no looting, no random violence against passersby.

We do not know whether this "storming" of the Capitol was aided and abetted by agents provocateurs of the American permanent state, or merely allowed to proceed in order to reap its premeditated benefits. Either way, the event—as promptly framed by the corporate media—suited the interests of the incoming regime and its media cohorts to a tee. Within hours, the deplorable sore losers were transformed into coup-attempting terrorists.

The old lessons of Paris, Petrograd, and Berlin were applied with gusto, not least by Joseph Biden himself. He sounded positively Leninist in his rage. "They weren't protesters. Don't dare call them protesters," he said. "They were a riotous mob. Insurrectionists. Domestic terrorists. It's that basic, it's that simple."

The rest of Biden's address heralded the new regime's agenda. The Capitol "riots" were a damning verdict against Trump's entire presidency, as he had "unleashed an all-out assault on institutions of our democracy." Trump's appointments of textualists to the Supreme Court undercut justice. His complaints that Obama's officials were spying on his campaign were but an attack on America's intelligence services. His calling out of media bias was tantamount to an attack on the "free press."

The following day, Facebook and Twitter suspended Trump's accounts, supposedly to prevent him from "inciting further violence." In reality Trump never encouraged his supporters to storm the Capitol, let alone to stage a coup. The assertion that he made an incendiary call to arms assumes that there was a hidden wink and nudge visible only to MAGA hat wearers. If you don't buy the narrative, you are a deplorable racist swine who should and will suffer consequences.

The reality is that a totalitarian regime is being set up in Washington with the active connivance of all segments of the Permanent State.

The storming of Congress will usher in a wave of anti-Deplorable terror, finalizing the rolling coup d'etat that began even before Trump's inauguration four years ago. Under Biden's regime of dubious legitimacy, federal agencies spying on Americans and keeping them in check will get massive funding and whatever legislative measures they need to keep so-called domestic terrorists cowed or jailed. Half the nation will be delegitimized and disenfranchised.

All of the above may well be in the American interest only if the coming ordeal, to which real Americans will be subjected, makes them resistant to the leftist-neoconservative Gleichschaltung (or "Coordination," a Nazi term meaning totalitarian control) and unafraid to resist as they deem fit. The ugly face of woke totalitarianism is visible to all. Each and every one of us will have to make his choice and take his stand. The 21st century may well be an exciting time to be alive after all. ◆

Srdja Trifkovic

Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, Foreign Affairs Editor of Chronicles, is the author of The Sword of the Prophet and Defeating Jihad.

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/the-woke-enabling-act/?fbclid=IwAR1mNFJYX18HhakOeApKtAc6INYEVTsR5BYHOSusKZPE2iq4YgAs6N-ulRI

Vuk Vuksanovic : France has become Serbia's new best friend in the EU

euronews.com

France has become Serbia's new best friend in the EU | View

7-8 minutes

---

On February 1, 2021, Serbian President, Aleksandar Vučić was in Paris for talks with his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron.

On that occasion, Macron said to his guest: “I particularly want to highlight the place that Serbia occupies for France.“ Vučić was equally warm: “France is an important country for us and a traditional true friend of Serbia.“

The usual diplomatic cordiality, aside, for the Balkan observers, the visit signifies that Serbia, the strategically most important country in the Balkans, has embraced France as its main great power backer in the West.

The ties between Paris and Belgrade have a deep historical foundation. The French cultural and political influence inspired Serbia on its path to independence from the Ottoman Empire. Serbia’s first constitution, the Sretenje Constitution of 1835 was inspired by France. In World War I, France was Serbia’s main ally in the West, leading to the erection of the Monument of Gratitude to France that stands to this day in Kalemegdan, Belgrade’s historical park and fortress.

In between two world wars, France had strong cultural influence in the newly founded Yugoslavia. France helped the formation of the Little Entente, the loose alliance of Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Romania and the Czech Republic against Germany and the Soviet Union.

The Yugoslav Wars and French participation in the 1999 NATO war against Serbia shook this historically strong relationship. Still, during that war, French opposed bombing Belgrade bridges. After the overthrow of Slobodan Milošević’s regime in 2000, French President Jacques Chirac was the first Western leader to visit Belgrade in late 2001.

Is Belgrade’s pivot a re-enactment of old historical ties? Not necessarily. History did not play a significant part in November 2018 during the centenary of the World War I armistice. During the ceremony, the Serbian President was not seated close to the world leaders, while the Kosovo President was.

Belgrade perceived this as disrespectful towards the old historical alliance and heavy Serbian casualties from that war, prompting the French ambassador in Belgrade to apologise. In April 2019, several pro-government tabloids in Serbia posted on their websites that the fire that caught the historic Notre Dame cathedral in Paris was “God’s punishment” for displaying the “fake state Kosovo’s” flag. The reports were retracted most likely due to the intervention from the Serbian government.

Is this pivot about Serbia’s European integrations? President Vučić talks about President Macron being a Serbian ally on its road to the European path. In July 2020, Serbia was the first country to accept the new methodology of EU enlargement, a French proposal.

However, the EU integrations is a rocky path. The EU is tackling its challenges, and in 2020 Serbia did not open a single chapter in its accession talks with the EU over the declining rule of law. Macron himself is weary about enlargement before the EU system reforms itself. In 2019, France vetoed precisely on that ground the opening of EU membership negotiations with North Macedonia and Albania. The new EU enlargement methodology was the result of a compromise with France.

So, why is Belgrade embracing Paris?

The embrace is due to Serbia’s need to have a great power backer in the West, particularly as the old partnerships of Serbian President Vučić are in crisis. For years, Vučić’s main backer in the West has been Germany led by Angela Merkel. In that relationship, Vučić backed Merkel’s policies during the migration crisis, while using ties with Merkel for domestic legitimisation. That partnership is cooling down. Merkel is displeased with the idea of land swap that Vučić advocated as a solution to Kosovo dispute with former Kosovo’s President Hashim Thaçi during Donald Trump’s presidency, and with Vučić’s illiberal tendencies at home.

The relations with the US are also uncertain as Vučić made a failed bet on Trump’s re-election, and now he fears that Germany and the US might jointly pressure him in recognising Kosovo without any face-saving concessions.

In need of great power mentor in the West, and with Germany and the US out of the game, who was left? The UK is caught in the post-Brexit ordeal, leaving France. The foundation was set in the summer of 2019 when Macron was the first French President to visit Belgrade after 18 years. In front of the Monument of Gratitude to France, Macron gave a speech in well-rehearsed Serbian, impressing the gathered Serbian citizens and eliminating past unpleasantries.

Now, Serbia is purchasing Mistral, an infrared man-portable air-defence system from France. In 2019, French construction Vinci began its 25 years concession for modernising and managing the Belgrade airport. The French utility company Suez will develop a waste management facility in Vinča. During summer 2019, Serbian tabloids praised Macron as the greatest Serbian ally in the fight for Kosovo although France has been among the first to recognise independent Kosovo.

Serbian elites invest in strengthening ties with France, in making France their new diplomatic protector. They hope that France can ease any potential pressures on Kosovo from Germany and the US, particularly in light of the Berlin-Paris duopoly within the EU. The relations with some of the Eastern partners are also shaky. Despite warm facade, Russia is unhappy about Vučić’s cooperation with the US under Trump, and Serbia does no know if Russia will compromise on Kosovo in a hypothetical bargain with the US. China has already replaced Russia as Serbia’s leading Eastern partner. Belgrade is now pairing Paris and Beijing to increase its bargaining power as evident from a planned project for Belgrade metro between French and Chinese companies. The recently signed EU-China investment deal in which President Macron played a part probably also inspired Vučić and his associates to make this move.

Whether leaders in Belgrade profit from their partnership with Paris, remains to be seen. It is dubious whether France is deeply interested in the Balkans and uncertain whether Macron will win his re-election in 2022. One thing is for sure. When President Vučić wants to talk with Europe, he will dial Macron’s number. For now, at least.

Vuk Vuksanovic is a PhD researcher in international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), an associate of LSE IDEAS, LSE’s foreign policy think tank, and a researcher at the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy (BCSP)

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