Gordon N. Bardos

Serbia's Democratic Transition: A Comparative Perspective

In retrospect, what happened in Belgrade on October 5 th, 2000 seems like a minor miracle.

That most of Serbia 's notoriously quarreling opposition leaders could drop their differences long enough to unite in their efforts to defeat Slobodan Milošević at the polls was difficult to imagine; Milošević himself certainly did not expect it. That a regime at the center of a decade of bloodshed in the Balkans would be toppled almost bloodlessly was difficult to imagine as well. (1)

Most remarkable of all, perhaps, is that despite the disadvantages, setbacks and wrong turns Serbia has made and had to confront since 1945 there is any democracy to speak of in the country at all. Over the past sixty-plus years, Serbia and its people have suffered through civil war, communist dictatorship, Milošević, the disintegration of several states and societies, a decade of wars, economic sanctions, international isolation, the largest refugee population in Europe, world-record setting hyper-inflation, coming to terms with crimes such as Srebrenica, an eighty-three day bombing campaign, the occupation of a part of its territory (and its historical and spiritual heartland at that), an economic depression the depth and duration of which far exceeds that of the Great Depression in the United States, the assassination of a prime minister, martial law . . .

Such a history is seldom conducive to the building of a stable democracy. And yet despite everything, since October 5 th Serbia 's democratic transition has made important progress. Several rounds of free and fair elections have been held at all levels of government, in September 2005 the World Bank named Serbia (then still in its partnership with Montenegro) the leading economic reformer amongst a group of twelve transition countries, in November 2006 Serbia was invited to join NATO's Partnership for Peace (PfP) program, and in November 2007 Serbia initialed a Stability and Association Agreement (SAA) with the European Union. Progress has been disappointingly slow, of course, but given the historical legacy and social and economic foundations on which Serbia 's democratic transition rests, even slow progress provides optimism about the future.

Despite such achievements and developments, considerable debate continues to rage over the actual degree of change Serbia has undergone since October 5 th , 2000. One school of thought holds that Serbia remains essentially unreformed since the Milošević period. (2) But despite the undeniable problems and setbacks Serbia 's democratic transition has had to face over the past seven-plus years, a considerable body of evidence suggests that significant progress has in fact been made. This can be seen from a number of fields: from improvements in the functioning of democratic institutions, to the fight against corruption, to improvements in the country's business climate (see Tables 1-5), Serbia ranks just about where one would expect it to be—somewhat behind regional neighbors already in the European Union (or close to gaining membership) and somewhat ahead of regional neighbors which have traditionally been the less economically and socially developed countries in southeastern Europe.

Viewed in this light, several paradoxes emerge from Serbia's post-2000 democratic transition. Conventional social science theories regarding the factors conducive to the emergence and durability of democratic polities appear unable to explain why Serbia 's democratic transition continues to make progress. (8) Theories stressing the importance of economic factors cannot explain why a country in which per capita GDP today is estimated to be less than half of what it was in 1990 is developing along democratic lines. Similarly, theories stressing the importance of a country's political culture (and especially those focusing on the predominant religious tradition amongst its population) seem inadequate as well. For instance, Cold War-era theories about the supposed incompatibility between Orthodox Christianity and democracy certainly seem outdated given the changes in Eastern Europe since 1989 (and should be a warning not to jump to conclusions about a similar supposed incompatibility between Islam and democracy popular in some circles today). (9)

Instead of the usual socio-economic factors used to explain a state's transition to democracy, what seem in fact to be the leading causal variables for explaining the relative success of Serbia 's democratic transition are political strategy and the influence of the international environment. The political strategy—essentially a non-violent approach to removing Milošević from power and a gradualist approach to post-communist, post-Milošević reform—emerged partly by design, partly by default, and has been harshly criticized in many quarters for being too slow or too timid. Yet the advantages of these strategies should not be underestimated. (10) As a recent major study by Freedom House has shown, a strategy of non-violence and the existence of broad-based civic movements are among the most important factors in promoting successful democratic transitions and the freedoms such transitions are supposed to lead to. (11) In severely polarized societies where significant potential for violence exists, bringing as many people into the political process as possible certainly has its advantages. (12) And in comparison to the results obtained by other recent attempts to radically reconfigure a political system, such as the American occupation authority in Iraq 's decision to disband the Iraqi army and de-Baathify governing institutions, the gradualist approach to political change clearly has distinct advantages.

The second causal variable that should be looked at in explaining the progress of Serbia's democratic transition over the past six years is the impact that the international environment has had on the country (and, of course, on all the Balkan states). As Maria Todorova has noted, in the 19 th century “The size, shape, stages of growth, even the very existence of the different Balkan states were almost exclusively regulated by great power considerations following the rules of the balance-of-power game,” (13) and anyone who has followed the former Yugoslavia's disintegration from 1991 to the present will immediately recognize how little things have changed.

Yet in a more positive sense, we can draw at least two conclusions regarding the impact of the international environment on both southeastern Europe as a whole in the period between 1989 and 2007, and Serbia specifically. First, the collapse of communism, both as a system of power and as a model for state-society relations, has left the Balkan states—for the present moment, at least (14)--with no alternative but to become market democracies. Whether Fukuyama 's belief that the “end of history” has been reached in terms of political and economic development will be proven true in the long-term remains to be seen, but for this temporally-defined period he almost certainly was. (15)

Second, and with specific reference to Serbia, it is clear that quick international efforts to reintegrate Serbia into the international community after October 5 th played an important role in pushing Serbia's reform process in a positive direction. Unfortunately, the reverse has proven true as well, as seen in the slowdown in the reform process after the European Union halted Stabilization and Association (SAA) talks with Belgrade in May 2005.

Given these considerations, the ups and downs of Serbia 's post-2000 reform process suggest that there are potential positive and negative consequences of using strict conditionality to promote reform in southeastern Europe . Privately, many government officials throughout the region admit that they need outside pressure to have political cover (and generate popular acceptance) for difficult reform measures. On the other hand, both the EU and other international institutions have often overestimated the ability of the still relatively fragile polities and societies in the region to adopt such reforms, and the pace at which they can adopt them. As the EU's recent progress reports for the Balkan countries show, the reform process in the region has slowed in recent years, which inevitably brings up the question of how powerful the attraction of EU accession really is in generating reform, absent a reliable timetable for accession. (16) As Tihomir Loza has recently noted,

Whether a process defined solely in technocratic terms is appropriate and sufficient to speedily lift this problem-ridden region from an unhappy past and into a brighter future is another matter. The [European Commission's} praise for the EU's conditionality principle is, however, contradicted by its own verdict on the region's progress. If the countries have largely failed to live up to expectations, it may well make sense to examine the limits of conditionality. (17)

In many ways, the strongest case for reviewing the policy of strict conditionality for the Balkan countries comes when policy towards cooperation with the Hague Tribunal is examined. For the past several years, much of Washington's and Brussels' relations with Serbia—such as negotiations with the EU over an SAA or Serbia's membership in NATO's Partnership for Peace program—have been reduced to the fate of one man: Ratko Mladić. But while the morality of insisting on Mladić's arrest is unassailable, the consequences of freezing Serbia 's Euro-Atlantic integration efforts because of one individual are largely detrimental to long-term stability in the Balkans. As one Balkans expert has put it, “How important is [Ratko] Mladić's arrest balanced against the integration of eight million people in a region that badly needs stability?” (18)

Even on this issue, however, significant progress has been made. As of October 2007, for instance, 42 out of 46 individuals indicted by the Hague Tribunal (91 percent) had been extradited, and 98 percent of the documents requested by the ICTY had been turned over. (19) Because of such efforts, ICTY Chief Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte gave two positive assessments of Serbia 's cooperation with the tribunal during the course of 2007. (20)

Moreover, in these and other instances it is useful to engage in some comparative analysis regarding how Belgrade politicians are dealing with these issues and similar problems, not to justify any action or inaction, but simply to argue that there is nothing particularly “Serbian” or “Balkan” about such behavior; in fact, Belgrade politicians are responding to the same incentives, disincentives, and concerns (and probably making the same miscalculations) that all politicians respond to and make—how a particular course of action may affect their country's strategic interests, how a particular course of action will affect social stability, how a particular course of action may affect their re-election chances, etc. For all the criticism Belgrade has received for its failure to turn over Ratko Mladić, for instance, the fact remains that Belgrade has turned over two former presidents, a former prime minister, and several top generals and security officials. By way of comparison, the U.S. government does not recognize the jurisdiction of international courts over U.S. military personnel, and the ICTY chief prosecutor has on several occasions publicly bemoaned the fact that the United Nations Mission in Kosovo has the worst record of any governing authority in the region as regards cooperation with the tribunal. (21)

In 2008, of course, Serbian democracy faces perhaps its most severe challenge as what will most likely be an unfavorable decision (from Serbia 's perspective) on Kosovo's future status is expected. How Serbian authorities and Serbian public opinion react to this decision will be a telling indication of the strength of Serbia 's democratic system.

Here again, however, it is worth noting that much of the criticism that Belgrade's leaders have received for their unwillingness to renounce Serbian sovereignty over Kosovo (which, it should be added, as of this writing remains internationally-recognized under U.N. Security Council Resolution 1244) seems ill-informed at best, for there are few instances in history (and few political leaders worth their salt) who willingly give up a part of their country's territory. While DeGaulle and Algeria or Begin and the Sinai come to mind, such examples have by far been the exception and not the rule, and neither Algeria nor the Sinai of course did not have the religious, cultural, or historical significance to the French or the Israelis that Kosovo has to the Serbs. Nearby Slovenia and Croatia , for instance, have for much of the past decade been unable to agree on where to draw their common border due to a dispute over a couple of essentially insignificant villages. Even an “established democracy” such as the United Kingdom went to war in 1982 to maintain its sovereignty over a group of relatively insignificant islands 6,000 miles from London whose British subjects consisted mainly of sheep and penguins. All told, there is little either surprising or extreme in the unwillingness of a country's political leaders to sign away fifteen percent of their state's territory.

Towards the end of a long career dedicated to the study of Soviet communism and the Anglo-Saxon common law system, the late Leonard Shapiro wrote that “a society can only progress by evolution, and not by convulsions, by growth, and not by surgery dictated by belief in some system.” (22) Experience from both the distant and more recent past suggests how right Shapiro was. Whether one looks at the Bolshevik takeover of Russia in 1917, the communist takeover of Yugoslavia in 1945, or the American neo-conservative invasion of Iraq in 2003, violent attempts to transform states and societies seldom bring good results. Since October 2000, Serbia 's democratic transition has avoided revolutionary extremism, and there are grounds for believing that the elements that brought the transition this far—a political strategy avoiding radical excesses, and a supportive international environment—can bring the transition through to a successful conclusion.

Assistant Director, Harriman Institute

Columbia University

Endnotes:

1. An encyclopedic analysis of Serbia during the Milošević period can be found in Slobodan Antonić, Zarobljena zemlja: Srbija za vlade Slobodana Miloševića ( Belgrade : Otkrovenje, 2002). For interesting accounts of the Milošević period in English, see Lenard J. Cohen, Serpent in the Bosom: The Rise and Fall of Slobodan Milošević (Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 2001), and Eric D. Gordy, The Culture of Power in Serbia: Nationalism and the Destruction of Alternatives (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). For accounts of the actual overthrow of the Milošević regime, see Dragan Bujosević and Ivan Radovanović, The Fall of Milošević: The October 5 th Revolution (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), and Svetozar Stojanović, Serbia: The Democratic Revolution (Amherst , NY : Humanity Books, 2003). For accounts of the post-2000 period, see Miša Đurković, ed., Srbija 2000-2006: Država, Društvo, Privreda ( Belgrade : Institut za Evropske Studije, 2007), and Ivana Spasić and Milan Subotić, eds., Revolution and Order: Serbia after October 2000 ( Belgrade : Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, 2001).

2. This has been a consistent view held by analysts at the the International Crisis Group (ICG). See, for instance, recent ICG reports such as “Serbia's New Government: Turning from Europe,” Europe Briefing N°46, 31 May 2007; “ Serbia: Spinning its Wheels ,” Europe Briefing N°39, 23 May 2005; “Serbia's U-Turn” Europe Report N°154, 26 March 2004; “Serbian Reform Stalls Again” Europe Report N°145, 17 July 2003. Such views are also prominent in the work of writers such as Sabrina Ramet. See, for instance, “The Sirens and the Guslar: An Afterword,” in Sabrina P. Ramet and Vjeran Pavlaković,eds., Serbia since 1989: Politics and Society Under Milošević and After ( Seattle , WA : University of Washington Press , 2005), 395-413.

3. All scores available at: http://www.freedomhouse.hu/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=84. Note: 2003 scores for both Serbia and Montenegro are for the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro . Countries are listed in order of their scores in the Nations in Transit 2007 edition. Disclosure: The present author has served as a Balkans consultant for Freedom House since 1999. However, I did not contribute to the Nations in Transit series during the reporting period cited above.

4. All scores available at www.transparency.org. Note: scores for Serbia from 2003-2005 include Montenegro . Countries are listed in order of their scores in Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index.

5. All scores available at:www.doingbusiness.org. Note: The score for both Serbia and Montenegro in 2006 applies to the last year in which the state union of Serbia and Montenegro still existed. Countries are listed in order of their scores in the Doing Business 2008 report.

6. Source: Freedom House Freedom of the Press ratings, available at: www.freedomhouse.org . Notes: 1) Countries are listed in order of the rankings in the 2006 survey; 2) Ratings for both Serbia and for Montenegro in 2004 are a joint rating. Please note that the same personal disclosure in footnote number three also holds true for the Freedom of the Press survey.

Reporters Sans Frontiers (RSF) also publishes an annual “World Press Freedom Index” which has somewhat different rankings for the countries surveyed above; however, the present author considers the Freedom House survey more reliable because the RSF reports include some inexplicable anomolies; for instance, in the 2007 RSF World Press Freedom Index, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Croatia, and Romania all ranked higher than the United States in terms of freedom of the press. RSF reports are available at: www.rsf.org

7. Source: Standard & Poor's Ratings Direct , available at: www.ratingsdirect.com. Notes: 1) Bosnia & Herzegovina and Albania are not rated by Standard & Poor's; 2) During the reporting period examined, Bulgaria received upgrades in 2005, 2006, and 2007; Croatia received an upgrade in 2005; Macedonia received an upgrade in 2005; Montenegro received an upgrade in 2005 and 2007; Romania received upgrades in 2005 and 2006 and was downgraded in 2007; and Serbia received upgrades in 2005 and 2006 and was downgraded in 2007 because of concerns over a loosening of fiscal policy. I would like to thank Mr. George Sarcevich, a Belgrade based economic consultant and investment advisor, for sharing his expertise on this topic with me.

8. In fact, recent developments in many parts of the world are forcing scholars to revise their understanding of the relationship between wealth and democracy. See, for instance, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and George W. Downs, “Development and Democracy,” Foreign Affairs 84 (September-October 2005).

9. Unfortunately, many journalists continue to make such arguments. With respect to the supposedly negative influence of Orthodoxy upon democracy, see Victoria Clark, Why Angels Fall: A Journey Through Orthodox Europe From Byzantium to Kosovo ( New York : St. Martin 's Press, 2000).

10. Historical echoes of the role of primary role of politics in Serbia 's democratic development can be found in the latter half of the nineteenth century as well. On this issue, see Gale Stokes, Politics as Development: The Emergence of Political Parties in Nineteenth-Century Serbia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990).

11. See Adrian Karatnycky and Peter Ackerman, How Freedom is Won: From Civic Resistance to Durable Democracy ( New York : Freedom House, 2005).

12. In the case of Palestine , for instance, George Soros has forcefully argued for the need to include Hamas in both internal Palestinian politics, and in the peace process with Israel in general. See Soros, “On Israel , America & AIPAC,” The New York Review of Books LIV (12 April 2007), 20-23.

13. Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 169.

14. It remains to be seen what impact the return of Russia to a prominent role in Balkan affairs will ultimately have on how these polities and societies develop. Much of this, of course, depends upon the course of Russia 's own future development.

15. Fukuyama , “The End of History,” The National Interest 16 (Summer 1989).

16. EU progress report's for the countries of southeastern Europe are available at: http://ec.europa.eu/enlargement/key_documents/reports_nov_2007_en.htm

17. See Tihomir Loza, “Delaying the Inevitable,” at http://www.tol.cz/look/TOL/article.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=4&NrIssue=243&NrSection=2&NrArticle=19130&tpid=8

18. See Timothy William Waters, “Why Insist on the Surrender of Ratko Mladic?” The New York Times , 12 May 2006.

19. Figures according to Rasim Ljajić, president of Serbia 's National Council for Cooperation with the Hague Tribunal. See “Ljajić: 90 posto zahteva ispunjeno,” 26 October 2007, available at www.b92.net.

20. See, for instance, “Brussels Gives Green Light to SAA with Serbia After Positive Appraisal of Cooperation with Serbia ,” RFE/RL Newsline , 7 November 2007, available at: http://www.rferl.org/newsline/2007/11/4-SEE/see-071107.asp

21. See, for instance, “Thirteenth Annual Report of the International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia since 1991,” A/61/271-S/2006/666 (21 August 2006), available at: http://www.un.org/icty/rappannu-e/2006/AR06.pdf

22. See Shapiro, “My Fifty Years of Social Science,” in Ellen Dahrendorf, ed., Russian Studies (New York: Viking, 1986), 24.