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Serbia's Military Neutrality: Origins, effects and challenges

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Serbia is the only state in the Western Balkans that is not seeking NATO membership. In December 2007, Serbia declared military neutrality and in spite of its EU membership aspirations, developed very close relations with Moscow. The objective of this paper is threefold. First, I argue that in order to understand why Serbia declared military neutrality, one has to look both at the discursive terrain and domestic power struggles. The key narrative that was strategically used by mnemonic entrepreneurs, most importantly by the former Prime Minister Vojislav Koštunica, to legitimize military neutrality was the trauma of NATO intervention in 1999 and the ensuing secession of Kosovo. In the second part of the paper, I discuss the operational consequences of the military neutrality policy for Serbia's relations with NATO and Russia, as well as for military reform and EU accession. Finally, I spell out the challenges ahead in Serbia's neutrality policy and argue that its decision makers will increasingly be caught between pragmatic foreign policy requirements on the one hand and deeply entrenched traumatic memories on the other.
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... Since the early 1990s, regardless of its international reputation (it was primarily labelled an aggressor state, and then a transitional state that gradually came to be identified as (semi-)authoritarian), Serbia has tried to position itself as a key player in the region. In many ways, it has been interesting to replicate the former Yugoslavia's successful balancing between the East (political shelter) and the West (economic shelter) while insisting on military neutrality (Ejdus, 2014;Radoman, 2021;Stojković & Glišić, 2020). As assessed elsewhere, 'Yugoslavia also concentrated on developing a mode of defense which would afford a small state a credible deterrent against a much larger aggressor' (Braun, 1983, p. 100). ...
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... In this way, Serbia remained the only country in the region not seeking NATO membership (Tepavcevic, 2022b). Yet, it did not turn into legislation, as Serbia remains member of NATO's "Partnership for Peace" initiative (Ejdus, 2014). Additionally, Gazpromneft's investment in Serbia also provided Gazprom with an opportunity to control approximately one quarter of Serbia's state budget, making it along with the building of the South Stream gas pipeline -Russia's major political leverage in the Balkans (Reljic, 2009;Tepavcevic, 2018). ...
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... 68 At the same time, the collective identity narrative about the traumatic NATO bombing as an act of aggression translated into a policy of military neutrality. 69 On 26 December 2007, the National Assembly of Serbia adopted the Resolution on Protection of Sovereignty, Territorial Integrity and Constitutional Order, which was not, however, further elaborated in any of the strategic documents adopted later, 70 allowing for differing interpretations in different geopolitical contexts. In this very particular context, the adoption of the Resolution on Military Neutrality was primarily meant, as Filip Ejdus points out, 'to be a message of friendship to Moscow, from which Belgrade expected support in its legal and diplomatic battle to preserve its virtual sovereignty over Kosovo'. ...
Chapter
This chapter seeks to analyse the impact of Pan-Slavic ideas on the framing of Serbia’s contemporary collective identity. More specifically, it attempts to answer the question of whether, in what ways, and to what extent the Serbian political elite from the period of the 2000 democratic changes in Serbia onwards have framed Serbia’s foreign policy, and thereby also its identity, by mobilizing Pan-Slavic ideas. In so doing, the chapter focuses on discursive manifestations of Slavic solidarity through the ‘special relations’ between Serbia and Russia. It is argued that Pan-Slavic ideas are manifested as a mythologized attachment to Russia with varying degrees of ‘sentiment intensity’ depending on particular contexts. Drawing on critical geopolitics, the chapter sheds light on how Serbian political elites have constructed narratives about the Serbian-Russian ‘special relationship’, how they have represented this relationship to explain crises, and how they have developed strategies and found solutions to these situations.
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Thesis
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