The last revolution of the twentieth century came late. It was only after the overthrow of Slobodan Milošević on 5 October 2000 that Serbia’s official ‘transition to democracy’ began. With it came a bland new jargon, introduced by the Western donors and consultants who descended on the country in droves, preaching the new civic religion of ‘reform’ and gesturing vaguely towards a radiant European horizon. Serbia’s new Democratic Party-led government set about privatizing state-owned enterprises and building state capacity, while ngos devoted themselves to establishing the rule of law, empowering local communities, promoting gender equality, strengthening citizen participation and fostering respect for minority rights. ‘Serbia will be dragged kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century,’ vowed one Western diplomat.footnote¹

Of this ‘delayed transition’, there have always been at least two stories. In the elite’s telling, Serbia entered the new millennium diminished, but with an abundance of hope. After a decade of marginalization and immiseration under Milošević, the professional class would finally be restored to its rightful place in society. Serbia would come to terms with its past, atone for its multitude of sins, shun its suicidal nationalism and become a ‘normal’ country.footnote² Its future was with the West. There was no alternative to Europe. This was the story told by the country’s liberals, supported by powerful backers in the West, for whom Serbia in 2000 had a more global meaning. For American Democrats, British New Labourites and German Greens, Serbia represented the triumph of a foreign policy centred around military-backed humanitarianism. The rules-based order upheld by Western powers had a ‘responsibility to protect’ victims of aggression, wherever they may be. The International War Crimes Tribunal for Yugoslavia would be a model, set up to bring non-Western aggressors to justice. Kosovo’s independence as a peaceful, multi-ethnic democracy would be a rebuke to anti-war protestors—proof, as the British Foreign Secretary put it, of ‘an intervention that worked’.footnote³ Serbia’s youth-powered and expertly branded uprising would serve as a template for others around the world; its Otpor! cadres would go on to train young activists from Egypt to Cuba in waging Gene Sharp’s nonviolent struggle. The success of the us–eu intervention in Serbia could legitimate all future others. 

There was always another story, though, one that was rarely transmitted in the West. This was the position held by the majority in Serbia. For them, life after the revolution did not improve, and in some ways, it got worse. The enrichment of the upper-middle class came at the expense of farmers and workers. Jobs disappeared and with them, class mobility. Globalization did not bring prosperity but exploitation. Far from being a revolution of ‘people power’, as its Western supporters hailed it, 5 October looked like a transfer of power from one corrupt elite to another. The word ‘democracy’ acquired a negative connotation. Many were quick to note the hypocrisy of its proponents, who recoiled at the idea of killing in the name of religion or the nation, but championed war in the name of human rights.

But the triumphant liberals would themselves experience disappointment in time. Relatively quickly, their story goes, the dream of democracy collapsed ‘under the weight of Serbian political reality and its medieval ways’.footnote⁴ For some members of the elite, the Serbian nation was innately barbaric, with a penchant for corruption and violence, a love of strongmen and a stubborn refusal to accept defeat. The dominant national character, inimical to change, had stymied the consolidation of democracy. Some would say that the emergence of Aleksandar Vučić, the Progressive Party leader who has ruled the country for the past ten years, has proven them right. A figure drawn from the worst of the Milošević-era past, Vučić swiftly transformed Serbia into a place where people nervously lower their voices when discussing politics in public and suspicions infect many social interactions. But there is another side to Vučić. During the anti-Milošević demonstrations in the 1990s, there was a famous banner which read: ‘Belgrade is the World’. Vučić himself seems the antithesis of this cosmopolitan message, but in his own way he appears determined to put Serbia back on the map.

The two stories reflect the popular idea that there are ‘two Serbias’, the first being nationalist, rural, uneducated, resentful of globalization, fond of folk music and emotionally allied to Russia, while the ‘other’ or ‘second’ Serbia is liberal, educated, unabashedly elitist, anti-nationalist, fond of rock music and looks to the West.footnote⁵ But the divisions have always been more complex than that—and Serbia itself has always been characterized as much by flux as permanence. Serbia is a little bit bigger than Ireland, its elongated north-south orientation a somewhat jagged oblong at the heart of the Balkan peninsula. Its fertile northern plains are bisected by the Danube, connecting Belgrade to the other great cities of central Europe; the forested hills of its central regions are framed by broad mountain ranges, rich in thermo-mineral springs. To the north and east, Serbia is bordered by Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria; to the south and west, by its former fellow republics in the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia. A person who has lived in Belgrade since the 1980s will have inhabited four different countries without moving: first, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which in 1992 became the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia; then, in 2003, the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro; and finally, since 2006, the Republic of Serbia, as it remains today. Yet the exact contours of the country still aren’t settled. Slowly but inexorably, Serbia is being excluded by Washington and Brussels from any say over its nato-occupied former province and mythical-historical heartland, Kosovo, which today has an ethnic Albanian majority.

Slavs arrived in the Balkans in the mid-6th century, with the Serbs appearing in the 7th century; over the following centuries, these South Slavs managed to absorb many of the local populations they encountered. It is from this admixture of Slavic settlers and older Balkan populations that the modern Serbs descend. The early Serbs established a series of principalities that veered between independence, vassalage and Byzantine and Bulgarian rule, until, in the early 13th century, Stefan (1165–1228) obtained a royal crown from the Pope. His brother and the future patron saint of Serbia, Sava, nevertheless kept Serbia in the Orthodox fold by convincing the Byzantine Patriarch to grant a separate self-governing church. The newly created Serbian Orthodox Church built many monasteries in Kosovo and the surrounding regions, making the area medieval Serbia’s spiritual heartland.

It was at Peć, on the western tip of present-day Kosovo, bordering on Montenegro and Albania, that the 14th-century ruler Stefan Dušan (1308–55), who proclaimed himself Emperor of the Serbs and Greeks, established the Patriarchate of the Serbian Orthodox Church, putting it nominally on a par with the churches of Rome and Constantinople. These rulers belonged to the Nemanjić dynasty, whose state was one of several local kingdoms that arose in the Balkan region between the waning of Byzantine power and the advent of the Ottomans; at its brief apex under Dušan, it appointed governors as far afield as Macedonia and northern Greece, aiming at the conquest of Constantinople itself. Dušan was buried in the monastery-fortress complex he founded at Prizren, Kosovo’s second city. A generation later Prince Lazar, a powerful regional lord who emerged as Dušan’s would-be successor, led Serbia’s forces to what is remembered in folk tales as a glorious defeat by the Ottoman Army at Kosovo Field, close to Pristina, on St Vitus Day, 28 June 1389. Although historians usually consider the battle a tactical draw, with some Christians terming it a Christian victory, Serbia could not recover from the loss of manpower, and one by one, the surviving regional nobles accepted Ottoman sovereignty. But Lazar was canonized as a Christian saint and martyr and a cult formed around his remains, which were ceremonially transported from his burial place at Pristina to later centres of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Lazar’s valorous deeds—and those of the outlaw heroes of the mountains and forests who fought the new Ottoman ruling class in the five centuries of occupation that followed—would be commemorated in Serbia’s famous oral epics, hailed by the German Romantics as northern Balkan equivalents to the Iliad.footnote⁶