The Kosovo Myth Brought to an End

The Balkans have finally experienced what has been anticipated for years and what has held the entire Balkan region hostage – Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić has finally and unequivocally admitted to the country's citizens that the independence and sovereignty of Kosovo over its entire territory is inevitable and that nothing can be done about it anymore. Anyone rational knew that Serbia's illusion that Kosovo is part of its territory must one day end, but the question was who and how would admit this to the Serbian public. Vučić has finally done it after the Berlin summit, which – what an absurdity – was called another failed meeting in numerous media outlets. As much as it failed, it brought Vučić to a wall, on two fronts. On the one hand, there is nothing left of the advocated demarcation with Kosovo, which Vučić tried to achieve by presenting it as a great political victory, and on the other hand, the political master of Serbia is left without a backup plan, with which he could have continued to deceive his subjects with the Kosovo issue for a few more years. After Berlin, the ruler asks himself, before the entire Serbia: my demarcation plan has failed – so what now?

By postponing this inevitable moment for years, the Serbian regime has led itself into an absurd, not only factual but also logical dead end. It can no longer even fake the basic postulates of the Serbian utopian approach to the Kosovo issue, on which Serbian society has ridden since the rise to power of Slobodan Milošević. President Aleksandar Vučić has become so entangled that he cannot even answer the elementary dilemma of the average Serbian patriot - how did the famous slogan "Kosovo is the heart of Serbia", which echoed everywhere, from the parliamentary hall to football stadiums, turn into the idea of demarcation, which would only give Serbia an insignificant part of a heart atrium from that "heart of Serbia".

The incomprehensible culture of forgetting in the largest part of the public would, of course, have allowed Vučić to present this project as a great political victory, had it somehow succeeded, but now that everything has failed, analysts in Serbia legitimately ask: by what magic did Vučić impose demarcation on the hypnotized Serbian public as the supreme interest of today's Serbia, and declared the recent slogan about Kosovo as the heart of Serbia, which had been the measure of patriotism for decades, as a traitorous platitude of today's opposition? And finally, how did Vučić end up in a position in that idea to have the undivided support of the "hated Serbian enemy" Hashim Thaçi?

When the astonished Serbian public somehow recovers from the shock in a few days, the new, very unpleasant question for the President of Serbia will arise: how is it possible that Kosovo – even Vučić himself admits it – is irrevocably lost, and Russia did not lift a finger to prevent it. As early as mid-January, during the visit of Russian President Vladimir Putin to Belgrade, tens of thousands of enthusiastic people on the plateau in front of the Temple of Saint Sava were convinced that Serbia had a powerful protector behind it, that Putin, the greatest Orthodox hero of today, would tirelessly watch over Serbia and its greatest treasure – Kosovo, instilling fear in the hearts of Serbia's enemies with his very presence. Who among them could have even thought that less than four months later, Vučić himself would admit that Kosovo was lost forever, and that Putin was nowhere to be found?

However, it could have been hinted at even before leaving for Berlin that the President of Serbia was aware that his charade about Kosovo was coming to an end. Heartbreaking messages of regret that Denis Bećirović, instead of the "legitimate representative of Bosnia and Herzegovina" Milorad Dodik, was invited to Berlin, were a clear sign that Vučić was left alone, exposed and without support. And that he was deeply aware of it.
However, Vučić kept the real reason for his defeat from the citizens of Serbia. He was not left alone due to the strengthening of Serbia's enemies, but because Brussels relentlessly and directly told him that by playing on two cards – the card of the West and Russia – he had lost all political credit with European institutions. In his political balancing act, he consciously and voluntarily took on obligations from Brussels that he did not fulfill, and the attempt to compensate for this in some strange political game with favor from Russia remained only halfway.

With the failure of the project of demarcation and unpacking borders in the Balkans, Kosovo is not the only political asset lost for Vučić. Political combinations around Republika Srpska as a kind of compensatory cake for territorial rearrangements in Kosovo have also been extinguished, which means that Vučić's effort to continue his usual political maneuvering in Serbia by staying in power with that idea has also been extinguished.

The Berlin summit may have failed, but it revealed a historical fact important for the entire Balkans – Aleksandar Vučić has brought the Kosovo myth to an end. The national Serbian mythomaniacal charge about Kosovo as the greatest Serbian sanctuary has burst like a soap bubble, and no one in Serbia anymore, not even Vučić himself, knows what to do next.