SERBIA’S TRANSITION
Who Do I Call If I Want to Speak to Belgrade?
A Pavlovic Today reporting series following Serbia’s transfer of power: who speaks for the state, where authority resides and whose answer counts.
Who do I call if I want to speak to Belgrade?
On the afternoon of Nov. 2, four representatives of Serbia’s election-winning Student List sat down in Brussels with Marta Kos, the European Union’s commissioner for enlargement.
A significant diplomatic encounter, one might reasonably suppose, involving representatives of a political movement preparing to assume power.
There was just one rather extraordinary detail. The Serbian public had not been told who these four people were.
The meeting took place at Kos’ invitation. It was the Student List’s first high-level contact with the EU since its landslide victory on Oct. 25.
And here was a rather remarkable irony.
The European Commission, an institution that seldom misses an opportunity to lecture aspiring EU members on the virtues of transparency, accountability and press freedom, declined to disclose the identities of the four individuals invited to Brussels.
Apparently, transparency is a principle to be demanded of others, but not necessarily practiced at home.
The moment the Student List won the election, its meetings ceased to be the private affairs of a protest movement. They became part of the historical record of Serbia’s political transition, and they ought to be documented accordingly.
History, after all, is not something to be reconstructed at leisure once the decisions have been made, the doors have closed and the participants have conveniently forgotten what was said. Its first draft must be written in real time, while the evidence is still fresh and the people responsible can be held to account.
And here lies the fundamental distinction.
Who speaks for Serbia is no longer a question of how a protest movement chooses to organize itself. It is a question of foreign policy, democratic legitimacy and the authority to speak on behalf of a sovereign nation.
The case for open diplomacy
In Washington, when a senior American official sits down with a foreign counterpart, the meeting ordinarily produces a readout within hours. Who attended? What was discussed? What was agreed? And what happens next?
If no readout appears, the press asks for one. At the very least, journalists expect to know who was sitting around the table.
This is not some tedious exercise in bureaucratic box-checking. It is a fundamental principle of diplomatic accountability.
A readout establishes the official record. It allows each side to explain its own position, in its own words, rather than leaving one government to tell the world what another supposedly said, intended or agreed to.
Political scientists have a precise vocabulary for what is at stake. In an influential 1999 essay, Andreas Schedler split accountability into two parts. The first is answerability, the duty of those in power to explain what they did. The second is enforcement, the public’s ability to punish them when they get it wrong.
Journalists can demand the first. Only Serbian voters can deliver the second, and they cannot judge what they are never told.
The principle is older than modern political science. In 1795, Immanuel Kant proposed a simple test for any policy that touches other people’s rights: if it cannot survive being made public, it is wrong.
More than a century later, Woodrow Wilson placed “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at” at the very top of his Fourteen Points. Secret agreements, he warned, were liable to upset the peace of the world at some unexpected moment. Henceforth, he declared before Congress, “diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.”
And there, in that same historic address of 1918, Wilson posed a question that might just as easily have been directed at Brussels last week.
“For whom are the representatives of the Central Empires speaking?”
A century has passed, empires have collapsed, governments have come and gone, and yet the question has lost none of its force.
Who, precisely, is speaking, and by whose authority?
And here is a particularly striking historical detail. The 11th of Wilson’s Fourteen Points concerned Serbia. More than a century later, the question of who speaks for Serbia remains as pertinent as ever.
From the street to the state
A movement can be leaderless. A government cannot.
For two years, Serbia’s students ran their protests through plenums, open assemblies in which every student had a vote, and they refused to elevate leaders. That discipline carried them from the streets to an outright majority in the 250-seat National Assembly.
But a principle built for the street does not carry over into government. The American political scientist Jo Freeman made the point more than half a century ago in a celebrated essay, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” Groups that refuse formal leaders, she argued, do not end up leaderless. They end up with informal leaders whom no one chose and no one can hold to account.
The Student List’s representatives are no longer activists traveling abroad to explain their grievances. They are the people preparing to govern Serbia, and the officials they meet will treat their words accordingly.
That makes some basic questions unavoidable.
Who was in the delegation? Who chose them? Who authorized them to speak for the Student List? In what capacity did each of them attend? And what, precisely, were they allowed to say on Serbia’s behalf?
The only account came from Brussels
Two days after the meeting, Kos described it to the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee. She said the representatives see Serbia’s most important task as becoming a democratic country again. She also listed the priorities she said she understood the Student List to share with the EU: fighting corruption, protecting independent media and the judiciary, and greater strategic alignment with the EU.
In Brussels, alignment means something specific, and Kos has never been coy about it. Days after the election, asked whether Serbia could join the EU while refusing to sanction Russia, she said it would probably not be possible for a country that is not aligning with the EU on its strategic interests in foreign and security policy.
So did the four representatives from the Student List signal a change? Did they make any commitment, formal or informal? Did Russia come up, or Kosovo? Euronews reported that the conversation centered on domestic politics rather than enlargement. If that is right, the Student List should say so. If it is not, the public deserves to know what was discussed.
For now, Serbian people who want to know what their prospective leaders told the EU have exactly one source: the EU.
So where is the Student List’s own readout?
Brussels cannot write Serbia’s foreign policy
European integration may be Serbia’s strategic objective. It is not a substitute for a national foreign policy.
Kos represents the European Commission. She was appointed through the EU’s institutional system, and her job is to advance the Commission’s policies and priorities. That is her mandate.
Serbia’s incoming government has a different one: to represent Serbia.
A country cannot borrow its foreign policy from the EU as though it were a ready-made suit hanging in a Brussels closet.
The EU itself does not work that way. Its common foreign policy is negotiated among member states that arrive in Brussels with their own interests. Germany has its interests. France has its interests. Italy, Poland and Hungary have theirs.
Andrew Moravcsik, the Princeton political scientist whose work shaped how a generation of scholars understands the EU, describes the union as a running bargain among states. Each government first decides what it wants, then negotiates, then builds institutions to lock in the deal. A country that arrives without defined national preferences has nothing to bargain with. Serbia must be able to state its own.
And Serbia, as a candidate, does not even get a seat at that bargain. It is asked to align itself with common positions negotiated by others, in rooms where it is not present. That makes defining its own preferences more urgent, not less: a country that cannot shape the deal must at least know what it wants from it.
That policy will have to answer large questions, and soon.
What does Serbia want from the EU? What relationship does it intend to build with the United States, and what relationship will it keep with Russia and China? What is its approach to Kosovo and the rest of the Western Balkans? How will it handle energy security, defense cooperation and trade? Where does it stand in the global competition over artificial intelligence and advanced technology? And what place does Serbia intend to occupy in a world that is becoming more divided and considerably less predictable?
Brussels cannot answer those questions for Serbia, and it should not try. Serbia’s government has to answer them for itself.
Diplomacy runs on authority
Washington has a settled rule for this awkward stretch between victory and power. Days after his 2008 election, President-elect Barack Obama reminded the world that “the United States has only one government and one president at a time.” He insisted he was not the president, and would not be until he was sworn in on Jan. 20.
Serbia has no such convention. Until a government is formed, a Student List delegation speaks for a political movement, not for a state. Kos herself seems to recognize the distinction. On Oct. 27, days after the election and before she met the delegation, she said the EU had “not yet started yet to talk to the new government,” because “first, they will have to have a new government.”
That is precisely why the record matters. If these four were speaking only for a movement, their views should not be read in Brussels as a preview of Serbia’s next government. If they were speaking for that government, the Serbian public is entitled to their names.
The Student List should talk to Brussels. The issue is whether the public knows who is doing the talking, and on whose authority.
Before the incoming leadership tells Brussels what Serbia wants, it should tell the Serbian public who has the authority to speak in the country’s name.
Who do I call if I want to speak to Belgrade?
Ksenija Pavlovic McAteer is the founder and editor in chief of The Pavlovic Today, an independent newsroom credentialed at the White House, the State Department and the U.S. Senate press galleries. She has covered three American presidential transitions.
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