18.11.2021.

Putin is already carrying out a kind of regional aggression

What Northern Macedonia and BiH are doing is part of the policy of the democratic world, and the policy of the "Serbian world" is the complete opposite: because this policy of the authoritarian ruler of Serbia seeks to mark itself as the leader of all Serbs Serbia has an aspiration to turn into "columns" that do not integrate into society, but work on changing borders. The concept that opponents of liberal democracy in the 1990s called "humane relocation" (and genocide is part of such "humanity") is a latent part of this ideological scheme.

When social scientists searched for an answer as to why in the former Yugoslavia the disintegration of the state ended in a bloody war, and the Soviet Union, which seemed to be associated with a far greater risk of war, disintegrated peacefully, the main reason turned out to be fundamental political values elite in Russia and Serbia. Namely, the then Russian authorities understood some of the basic liberal-democratic postulates, including the one that the state is the Nation.

The principle of immutability of boundaries

In political terms, a nation is not a community of people of the same origin, but a community of people inhabiting some border-defined territory. The then Russian authorities, led by Boris Yeltsin, had numerous democratic deficits, lacked experience in governing in conditions of economic freedom, democracy, pluralism and multi-party system, but successfully learned the basic lesson of liberal democracy and what one would call a "civil state" understood and put into action.

In a modernizing Russia, which was on its way to becoming an open society, no one posed as a political question the fact that Russians remained living in other states, created by the collapse of the Soviet Union. The war in Yugoslavia was conditioned by the fact that Slobodan Milosevic and his followers did not even think that political problems could be solved by the principle of separation of powers, and not by changing borders.

The first administration in the Balkans to realize that power-sharing negotiations were superior to the civil war and an attempt to change internationally recognized borders was in Macedonia, where the Ohrid Agreement of August 2001 halted the national conflict between Macedonians and Macedonian Albanians and created a state with a complex governance mechanism but a functioning state.

Since both the EU and NATO are organizations based on the principles of liberal democracy, and thus on the principles of immutability of borders, Macedonia (today's Northern Macedonia) has shown that the mentality and political values belong to the Euro-Atlantic Alliance and the European Union. Before Croatia, Macedonia received the status of a candidate for the EU, but to date it has not opened membership negotiations. It is important that it is a member of NATO and that it enjoys the benefits of collective security, because as a democracy in the true sense of the word, it really deserves it.

"All Serbs in one state"

Milosevic was not a socially uneducated man and he knew very well why he decided on the concept of "all Serbs in one state". Namely, nationalism has always been a refuge for failed communist regimes, which instead of democratic legitimacy resorted to legitimation based on the concept of "insight into historical laws". Nationalism and “national assembly” is a historical “legality” that legitimized declining communist orders, and this concept is in some ways still at work today in the least successful post-communist dictatorships. The concept of "all members of the nation in one state" was played with by other "transitional regimes" in the Balkans, primarily Tudjman's authoritarian regime in Croatia. Today, regimes prone to such legitimation are defined by the oxymoronic coin of "illiberal democracy."

NATO and the European Union have always been principles-based alliances. NATO is still based on the Atlantic Charter, and the EU has defined its values in three pillars. Rule of law and protection of fundamental human rights; economic and political freedoms, and the free movement of people, goods and capital throughout the Union; and balanced and sustainable social development - these are the three pillars on which the Union is founded, and the acquis communautaire, the common legal heritage of the European Communities, which is firmly linked to these three objectives, is constantly evolving.

The process of accession to the European Union is usually defined as the process of harmonizing a system with the common legal heritage of the Union and therefore the accession process seems to be primarily a technical process of harmonization of legislation, and this aspect of the process is very measurable. However, there is no real EU accession without the adoption of the European principle of good governance, without the development of participatory democracy, the right to take into account all relevant social interests in the decision-making process, and especially without the political class and society as a whole values and objectives, even the three pillars on which the whole Union building is based.

The Russian world

Unlike "Arcadian times", when the policy of the Soviet Union in the dissolution process and Russia, which had just been defined as an important force, was determined by Mikhail Gorbachev, Edward Shevardnadze and Boris Yeltsin, when the doctrine of insight into historical necessities was abandoned and the nationalist platform did not prevail. about all Russians in one state, today's Russia with the authoritarian regime of Vladimir Putin, has defined this paradigm as its key political program, shaped in the concept of Russian peace (Russian world). The concept, of course, could honestly be called the concept of Greater Russia or the concept of the Restoration of the Russian Empire.

It is about creating a structure that turns Russians in all neighboring countries, former members of the USSR, into Putin's subjects and henchmen, or in terms of the process of building an anti-democratic parliamentary majority in Montenegro, into "Putin's column" in those countries.

Russians are not expected to integrate in the countries in which they live, but on the contrary, to be a disruptive factor in them.

With his policy towards Ukraine, manifestly, and towards Belarus, where he sponsors the authoritarian regime of Vučić's namesake Lukashenko, keeping him in power, but with a "fraternal embrace" destroying every room for maneuver of sovereign decision-making, Putin is already carrying out a kind of regional aggression. Only the Baltic republics, which feel Putin's terrible pressure and firmly resist him, are safe from that aggression thanks to the system of collective security within the Euro-Atlantic Alliance and to the brilliant economic progress based on a European policy of balanced development.

I know you, you know me

Russian Balkanologist Gennady Sisoyev is right when he sees the difference between Putin's Russian world and Vučić's Serbian world, first of all, in the difference in the international significance of the two countries. Russia is so important that the new, brilliantly prepared, US President Joe Biden had in the first telephone conversation with Putin the need to make a cut in relation to the times of the Donald Trump administration and clearly tell the interlocutor - I know you, you know me.

This is the most important sentence for the perspective of Euro-Atlanticism. Biden's America knows what a global threat Putin is, and it also knows that it needs an alliance with the EU to stop Putin from spreading chaos. The Allies have an understanding for the interests of their partners, so Biden made a big gesture to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, regarding North Stream II, but with built-in safeguards. Just as a systematic plan to neutralize Russia's harmful interests is being created at the priority level of global politics, so is the issue of chaos in some countries by states over which Putin's regime has an important, and negative, impact.

The advantage of the North Atlantic Alliance and the European Union is precisely that both the Alliance and the Confederation of European States are based on principles rather than pragmatic current interests. Integrations and associations based on the principles of liberal democracy and the rule of law, and the protection of human rights, can easily identify models of “illiberal policies” as something that is a direct attack on them.

Therefore, the Serbian world is not only a concept that calls into question the sovereignty of Montenegro, a NATO member country and a country that, despite all the current problems, is still a

leader in the region in joining the European Union, which encourages centrifugal forces in BiH. calls into question the values of liberal democracy, and therefore the values of state sovereignty and the inviolability of borders.

Only by the way, in order not to raise the issue of Kosovo, as part of Serbia, the excellent Advisory Opinion of the ICJ (International Court of Justice in The Hague, United Nations legal institutions) clearly states that the principle of protection of fundamental human rights takes precedence over the principle of indivisibility. Therefore, the Declaration of Independence of Kosovo, which was a defensive act, after the aggression and attempted genocide on the territory of Kosovo, is not contrary to international law.

NATO superiority

Definitely, NATO's superiority over organizations formed to stop the spread of the values of freedom and democracy is that it is based on principles, which is easy to predict who is an ally and who seeks to challenge the paradigm of the free world. Unlike Northern Macedonia, which without hesitation carried out the process of separation of powers and protected the unity of the state, and provided its citizens with fundamental rights, unlike Bosnia and Herzegovina, which has been discussing the principles of civil state (not as the exclusive state of one people) and modalities internal divisions of power and authority between communities, both national and local, which is a common political practice in democratic orders, are the opposite in the Balkans.

The virtue of NATO is also that it offers rational solutions and commitment in accordance with the rational judgment of interests. On the table are, on the one hand, a democratic agreement on the division of power within clearly defined state borders and the political integration of all citizens, who belong to a society, and on the other, a permanent irrational civil war. In addition to rational decision-making, NATO's advantage is the actual force, which can act as a means of deterrence, but also to ensure collective security.