The fight against “Serbian world”is a fight for democracy and sovereignty

The ideology of the “Serb World” is a continuation of Greater-Serbian projects from the 19th century to the present day, and effectively countering this idea in Montenegro requires emphasizing the Montenegrin national question and addressing the functioning of the church as one of the fundamental prerequisites for stability. This was among the key messages delivered during the panel “Understanding the ‘Serb World’: Threats to Democracy and Identities,” held as part of the second session of the regional plenary “Fractures in Democracy: Nationalism and Clericalism in the Western Balkans,” jointly organized by the Academy for the Development of Democracy (ADD), the Centre for Civic Education (CGO) in Podgorica, the Faculty of Political Sciences of the University of Sarajevo (FPN), and the German Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES).

Director of the Western Balkans Network, Dr. Boban Batrićević, reminded that the “genius of evil” behind the Holocaust lay in the fact that Nazi Germany devised a system in which the people taken to the crematoria ultimately paid for their own destruction—their transport to the camps, their accommodation and food—because they worked, received wages, and financed the machinery that annihilated them. He drew a parallel between this and the methods used by the current Serbian regime against its opponents.

“The ideology of the ‘Serb World’ is a continuation of Greater-Serbian projects from the 19th century to the present day. Unlike the concept of ‘Homogeneous Serbia,’ here we do not have a document that outlines the plan; it is hidden, and that is what makes it perversely ingenious,” he said.

Batrićević emphasized that one cannot prepare the ground in advance for the fight against the ideology of the “Serb World,” because it is an adaptive concept. According to him, this ideology controls 49 percent of the territory in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), has historical roots in Montenegro and currently governs the entire state apparatus there—something it cannot achieve in BiH—and is present only symbolically in Kosovo today.

The Serb World is, in my view, very well organized, because it rests on an intelligence, economic, media, and cultural paradigm, which enables Serbia to interfere in the affairs of independent neighboring states,” he said, stressing that it is particularly problematic that Western partners do not fully grasp how sophisticated this concept is in the case of Montenegro.

“Census data show that Montenegrins are disappearing without a war, meaning that the ideology of the ‘Serb World’ is most effective precisely without conflict. This is why the Montenegrin national question must be framed as an issue of European security. Without a Montenegrin nation, the stability of the Western Balkans is endangered. Reducing Montenegrins to 35 or 30 percent of the population—which is the goal of the Serbian Orthodox Church and Serbian representatives in Montenegro—leads to a situation in which the largest constituent group in Montenegro becomes excluded from decision-making, and what we get is a ‘state of peoples’,” Batrićević explained.

He stressed that the problem of the Montenegrin nation is that it is too small to control the state institutions that should be responsible for nurturing Montenegrin national identity. “Our task is to try—with the help of Priština and Sarajevo, and then the EU—to raise the question of how the church functions in Montenegro. Without a serious Montenegrin church—a church of the Montenegrin people, a church of Montenegro, an Ecumenical Metropolitanate in Montenegro, whatever we choose to call it—we cannot move forward,” Batrićević said.

The historian from Serbia, Dr. Milivoj Bešlin, stated that from Serbia’s perspective, the idea of the “Serb World” is not new. It is merely a new term, borrowed from Russian state propaganda, while the underlying concept has existed since the 19th century under the name Greater Serbia.

The idea of the ‘Serb World,’ which was once called ‘our extended homeland’ during the creation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later ‘Homogeneous Serbia’ during the Chetnik movement, and at times simply ‘Greater Serbia,’ is fundamentally territorial in nature and has always implied all territories where Serbs live. This is why the Serbian question in the region has been viewed as a territorial question. Territory was the key element,” he explained.

Bešlin stated that these concepts always required gathering all Serbs into a single state. “But that is not all. Greater-Serbian imperial ideas have always included an attitude toward others, not only toward the Serbian population. Among other things, this meant expelling the Muslim population as a ‘foreign element’ from this projected state, punishing Croats historically, and transforming Montenegrins in terms of identity,” he said.

“A great-state project must, by definition, include homogenization. If you eliminate national and identity pluralism, you eliminate political pluralism as well. That is why the idea of the ‘Serb World’ is actually directed against Serbia itself, and especially against a democratic Serbia,” Bešlin stressed.

He pointed out that today the Greater-Serbian project has tactically abandoned territory, and instead applies a doctrine of limited sovereignty over neighboring states. “Borders are not openly challenged, but the sovereignty of those states is fundamentally undermined. According to this logic, Vučić is not the president of Serbia, but the leader of all Serbs in the region. The people are the bearers of sovereignty, so Vučić becomes the bearer of sovereignty in Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and he sees himself as possessing it even in parts of Croatia,” Bešlin said.

Professor at the Faculty of Political Sciences of the University of Sarajevo, Dr. Šaćir Filandra, stated that Bosnia and Herzegovina has been an object of the ‘Serb World’ for the past 150 years in a practical sense. However, in his view, the “Serb World” and “Greater Serbia” are not synonyms.

“The project of Greater Serbia has definitively failed as a state project. This is difficult for its proponents to admit, but it has failed. The ‘Serb World’ appears as a cultural substitute adapted to new geopolitical circumstances in Europe, and it is a direct outcome of the failure of Greater Serbia,” Filandra concluded.

He stated that in today’s Europe, changing state borders by force is an extremely unpopular measure, which is why the “Serb World” is no longer based on territory but on population and on standardizing one nation as a single ethnic community. “Children in Banja Luka, Prijedor and Leskovac learn the same language, switch to the Ekavian dialect, and are taught the same heroes and the same myths. It is a form of severe cultural violence. This process takes place under the radar because it belongs to the sphere of culture, which we generally tend to ignore,” Filandra added.

He stressed that those who support and implement the “Serb World” project believe that the Western order will collapse, or disappear, and that they are essentially waiting for the fall of the European Union. “Thus, the ‘Serb World’ is a pause—an interim phase—in which they await chaotic circumstances, the collapse of the EU and the West, in order to create conditions for its full realization,” Filandra said.

Writer, journalist, politician, and civil society activist from Kosovo, Veton Surroi, argued that Serbia today is closer to Russia than it was when it became an EU candidate country.

“The second paradox is that Serbia is in a much worse situation today than it was back then regarding the Copenhagen criteria,” Surroi said.

He added that Serbia is today a far greater destabilizing factor in the region than it was when it first opened accession negotiations. “Negotiations with the EU do not necessarily mean that the situation in Serbia will change,” Surroi stated.

He stressed that the fundamental problem with the “Serb World” is that the region continues to live within unfinished wars and unfinished states. “The wars are not over in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Kosovo. Bosnia has lived for 30 years under Dayton, which is essentially a ceasefire agreement. Kosovo and Serbia exist within an unfinished war governed by the Kumanovo Agreement, which stopped hostilities, but it did not bring peace. Today, war is being carried out by other means,” Surroi assessed.

In his view, a major problem with Serbia’s transformation is that the EU does not have decisive influence over this process. “The question of Serbia’s transformation is the key security and political issue in Southeast Europe. And it is not just about the fact of transformation, but about how that transformation happens. It is crucial that it be a positive one, opening a democratic horizon for the citizens of Serbia, rather than pushing the country into new instability,” Surroi said.

Strategic communications consultant and former adviser to the Prime Minister of North Macedonia, Svetlana Siljanoska, said that in North Macedonia they do not hear much about the “Serb World” and that Russian narratives are currently far more dominant.

“The friendship between North Macedonia, Serbia and Hungary is discussed much more in our society, because of the new Government and because of Hungary, which has had direct implications for our society,” Siljanoska said.

She stated that the country is facing harmful narratives in the public discourse coming from the East. “We have a huge cloud coming from the East, and it carries a strong anti-democratic tone,” Siljanoska said.

According to her, that camp gathers forces and a budget and has three goals – to keep the Western Balkans as unstable as possible, to keep the region as far as possible from the EU, and to keep the region polarized, because in that way influence can be exerted and attention diverted from real problems.

“In practice, we see that they are quite successful in diverting citizens’ attention so that they do not deal with the real problems,” Siljanoska said.

She added that the anti-democratic campaign is successful in using its narratives because they are followed and receive attention. “We need to talk about why they are successful, how to thwart them, knowing that their goal is the erosion of democracy,” Siljanoska concluded.

The panel was moderated by sociologist Izabela Kisić from Belgrade.