The EU cannot support democracy in Serbia because there aren’t any pro-democracy people to be found here.

In an open letter, the European Union’s Commissioner for Enlargement, Marta Kos, in response to letters “from members of Serbian academia, political representatives, and civil society organizations expressing concerns about the current situation in Serbia” writes the following in its last paragraph:

EU accession is a whole-of-society project

The EU accession process requires an intense effort by the entire society. It needs to be a national project owned by everyone: the government, the parliament, the opposition, civil society, every region, town, and village, and ultimately every single citizen in the country.It is important that the conditions are established for an inclusive dialogue involving all stakeholders, political actors, institutions, and members of civil society to address reforms that are necessary for the European future of Serbia. This will strengthen the Serbian society and consolidate Serbia’s path towards EU membership.

The Serbian society, both its far-right autocratic government and its far-right protesters, blame the EU and the collective West for Serbian-made problems.

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The video posted on Serbian social media shows the anti-government protesters attacking a person trying to bring an EU flag to the protest in December last year, held on Slavija Square in Belgrade. This isn’t an isolated incident.

The particularly nasty character trait of Serbian political mythology is the belief that Westerners in general are naive because they, supposedly, don’t understand the local situation and hold bleeding-heart liberal positions, at least compared to dominant Serbian beliefs of blood and soil, and that the world functions on a master/slave dynamic. In our minds, Europeans and Americans are dumb weaklings who can be pressured, bullied, and manipulated by superior Serbian intellect (yes, people here genuinely believe that Serbs are better at everything than the rest of the continent and the Yankees).

An ever-increasing number of intellectuals, journalists, religious leaders, and other Concerned Citizens of the Internet, both in Serbia and abroad, keep pushing the false narrative that the news about the protests in Serbia is suppressed in Western media and that the EU is keeping President Vucic and his kakistocracy in power because of selfish economic and geopolitical interests, namely the proposed Rio Tinto lithium mining project and the notion that Vucic might turn to Russia and China for support if the European Union starts criticizing his authoritarian style of governance. The protesters are presented as educated, liberal, pro-democratic, cosmopolitan, open-minded young people who reject the nationalist past and are fighting against a corrupt government for a better tomorrow.

So feast your eyes on these flags waved by students and other protesters.

We call these babies the “no-giver flags” (zastava nedavača). It is an image of the map of the breakaway southern Serbian province of Kosovo, with a Serbian flag painted into it and the words “No giving up” or, more adequately translated, “No surrender”.

Non-recognition of Kosovo as an entity independent of Serbia, and calls for its return under our control, even if it means war, are a rallying cry of the Serbian far-right. The majority of both the government’s supporters and its detractors hold these beliefs.

The students and other protesters sported this iconography, along with Russian flags and the flags of the Bosnian Serb entity Republika Srpska, ever since the protests started in earnest last year. See for yourself:

Topla preporuka @studentblokade da kad već teraju opoziciju sa protesta, da se reše i ovih nedavača Kosova i zastava Republike Srpske. pic.twitter.com/vx8qbA6IiZ

— Fredi 👑 (@lazarevic_68) January 12, 2025

See, people working in foreign ministries of developed countries and the EU administration handling its enlargement and foreign relations know exactly what this is. They’re not stupid and some of them have had the dubious pleasure of witnessing such displays of “patriotism” since the late 1980s, when Vucic’s former boss, Slobodan Milosevic came to power and started a series of palace coups, called the Anti-Bureaucratic Revolution, or the Yogurt Revolution. Serbia, the Serbian provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina, and Montenegro came under the control of Milosevic, filling the local administrations with his loyalists before the eve of the Yugoslav Wars.

The Yogurt Revolution was undertaken under the pretext of purging the government of corruption and ending the supposed persecution of the ethnic Serbs in Kosovo.

Back in 2012. Vucic and his Serbian Progressive Party were democratically elected with a platform that promised to fight against perceived corruption and to return Kosovo to Serbia.

Are you, maybe, kinda, like, noticing a pattern here?

Knowing full well that what we have here is two sets of parochial, revanchist populists fighting over who’s the bigger Serb, the EU, and its member states are, for the time being continuing with business as usual and letting the Serbian apolitical political Schrödinger’s cats fight over an imaginary ball of yarn. Nobody needs another Khomeini.

The protesters could get that Nobel Peace Prize they were nominated for. Heck, a racist mass murderer like Yasser Arafat got one, so why wouldn’t a bunch of his Serbian admirers get one?