Vucic wins

Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic has made a big show over the past couple of years about the delicate Yugoslav-like balancing act that he publicly purports to be pursuing between East and West, pointing to his government’s EU aspirations as proof of its Western inclination though reminding the public that his failure to follow Brussels’ lead in sanctioning Russia is apparently validation of his society’s pro-Eastern sympathies. Most media outlets in Serbia are controlled in one way or another by the government, so regular Serbians could be forgiven for thinking that this schizophrenic policy has somehow yielded soft power benefits for their country. The reality, though, couldn’t be more opposite than the image being projected, since Vucic’s “Great Power Balancing” strategy is nothing more than a cheap play on the public’s nostalgia for the Yugoslav era of greatness that their country enjoyed during the Old Cold War.