Repeat-Election

[pompe]

Oh joy. Serbia is going into a new election in the wake of the Kosovo independence.

I'm not sure the Serbs will do the smart thing here, given that we had a decade of dubious cooperation before Kosovo went independent. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if Serbia had gone more pro-EU, if they had managed to keep Kosovo and maybe even the

Comments

[pompe]

Better, I guess.

I don't think it is impossible to have multiethnic federations. The problem is of course that something has to give. The Serbs haven't been ready to give inches quite as willingly and as timed as they probably would have had in order to keep Kosovo. With a more progressive Serbia, with not as much of a nationalist political slant, I'm not sure if Montenegro would have gone for full independence.

Then I think that Serbia has been really hurt by the exodus of young Serbs the last decades. I mean, people who leave are often progressive. I'm reminded by how Polish expats in Sweden in the last election voted heavily for getting rid of the old Polish leadership.

I might use TWTMNO in teaching this week, by the way. Colonial economics time in history class. ,-)

[rfmcdpei]

Then I think that Serbia has been really hurt by the exodus of young Serbs the last decades. I mean, people who leave are often progressive.

I'm planning a Demography Matters post about how the whole sets of anti-Eurabian policies was implemented in Serbia a decade before 9/11, with the "culling" of Muslim populations outside of Serbia proper being accompanied by a fairly nasty assault of younger generations, especially women, who didn't want to bear children soldiers for mother Serbia. Between that and economic collapse/gangsterization/warlordization, the eight hundred thousand young, educated Serbs leaving was barely counterbalanced by the similar number of Serb refugees entering the country

[rfmcdpei]

For the Montenegrins, the alliance with Serbia was something that they were willing to support within a federal framework for as long as it was convenient, though there might not have been if there hadn't been a Montenegrin republic created in Tito's Yugoslavia. As for Kosovo, Serbia felt a very strong attachment to the land and its monuments while its government and church encouraged a frightening amount of racist hatred for its majority population as outlined in Vladimir Arsenijevic's "Our negroes, our enemies"I don't think that Serbia cared about Montenegro. It does care about Kosovo, but keeping Kosovo in a federation with Serbia after 1999 is impossible. Would there be talk of keeping Quebec in Canada if, after the 1995 referendum, the Canadian army burned half of the province, massacred twenty or thirty thousand Quebecois, and allowed the return of the three million Quebecois refugees sheltered in New England only after three months of US air strikes? The well's been quite poised, sadly