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By Peter Zeihan
More than 15 weeks after Serbia's Jan. 21 national elections, time is running out for the various parties in parliament to form a majority coalition. Most Serb politicians do not see this as a problem. Serbian national pride is about to be crushed by Kosovo's imminent and inevitable independence, and no party is anxious to take part in the government, whose first act will be perceived as giving the province away. As such, the May 14 deadline for forming a government quite likely will slip on by, and such failure to act will open up a new election season.
Such an election season will be a continuation of the past four years of de facto Serb policies: denial. But this time such stubbornness could end with the demise of Serbia itself.
The Kosovo Impasse
It was not always like this.
The winner of most parliamentary seats in the 2003 elections was the Serbian Radical Party, a nationalist party that during the 1990s was the rabid junior partner in Slobodan Milosevic's ruling Socialist-Radical coalition. But this did not result in an isolationist government. In 2003, Milosevic was in The Hague for war crimes and most people in Belgrade felt the country was about to turn a corner and begin economically reintegrating with the rest of Europe. That impetus led the country's fractious pro-Western political parties to form a broad coalition in an attempt to bring Serbia in from the cold.
In 2007, the Radicals again won a majority of seats -- but this time around that feeling of imminent progress is nowhere to be found. After 18 years of ostracism from European culture, Serbs as a rule are impoverished, humiliated and demoralized. The international community appears poised to impose a final status on Kosovo that translates into de facto independence -- a devastating result to nearly a decade of diplomatic wrangling.
In 2003 there was a common feeling that, by putting aside their differences, the leading parties could push on to a brighter future; in 2007 no one wants to put aside their differences to become the government that oversees Kosovo's separation. The most likely result will be a fresh electoral season lasting about three months -- followed by the toughest decision a culture has to make: whether to swallow the collective pride and live on, or wallow in righteous indignation and risk dissolution.
Regardless of what one thinks of the rationale for the 1999 Kosovo war between Belgrade and NATO, pretty much everyone agrees on this: it not only hived off Kosovo from Serbia proper, but also definitively ended the Yugoslav wars. Those wars that raged first in Slovenia and later, and more infamously and furiously, in Croatia, Bosnia and ultimately Kosovo, claimed in excess of 300,000 lives and were the darkest chapter in European history since World War II. Most consider the Serbs -- primarily because of the actions of former Serb leader President Milosevic -- responsible for the majority of the carnage, but there is certainly plenty of blame to pass around.
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