Balkan Tinderbox: How Trump's Win Rekindled Revisionist Fires

In the past few years, in the shadow of the Russian-Ukrainian war and the never-ending conflict in the Middle East, the Balkans have barely avoided being plunged into bloodshed again. The two worst scenarios for the regions are a war between Serbia and Kosovo and the break-up of tri-national Bosnia and Herzegovina, which would most likely result in war as well.

In former Yugoslavia, a generation, born after the South Slavic war in the first half of the 1990s and the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia, has grown up. For them, relative peace is natural, but the passions that once led to war can be whipped up any time.

The US was the protagonist in the Balkan settlement of the 1990s. The 1995 Dayton, Ohio, peace agreement laid the foundations for an independent, hardly functioning Bosnia and Herzegovina with a highly complex state structure. The agreement can be criticised, but its considerable achievement was that Serbs, Bosniaks and Croats have not been at each other's throats - at least not with weapons - since then. The Serbs, who were carrying out ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, were stopped by the US-led NATO coalition in 1999 by bombing Yugoslavia, including Vojvodina, which was also inhabited by Hungarians. Since then, US policy has been trying to preserve these achievements with great difficulty.

Donald Trump’s stance was eccentric on this issue as well. During his previous presidency, he toyed with the idea of trying something else to resolve the Serbia-Kosovo conflict, such as the very 20th century, ill-remembered land swap. In the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, he was sympathetic to the position of the Serbs who wanted to break away.

Joining the EU with Moscow’s and Beijing’s help

Biden has been lenient towards the Serbs, not wanting to scare them away from the West and push them into the arms of Moscow and Beijing. We cannot say that this was entirely successful, on the contrary. China is pushing ahead unscrupulously in Serbia, its biggest project being the construction of the Budapest-Belgrade railway. The project was badly stained by the accident in Novi Sad last November, when the apron of the newly (and twice) opened station fell off. Serbia has also refused to turn its back on the Russians, they are, for example, adamantly opposing the sanctions. Their friendship with Russia is based on shared history (they drove out the Turks with Russian help in the 18-19th centuries) and religion (both countries are Orthodox Christian), in addition to their common Slavic roots. These ties are hard to tear apart.

Serbia, a candidate country since 2012, has been aspiring to join the EU, but has been doing so rather half-heartedly. In June 2024, Belgrade agreed with only 47 percent of the EU's foreign policy positions, compared to 60 percent in 2019. It might not be by chance that those accession negotiations are moving so slowly. Support for Serbian integration into the West has been somewhat hampered by pan-Slavism, and the 1999 NATO bombing did not help either.

Nor does the EU necessarily want a country that has a territorial dispute with its neighbour (Kosovo) and would like to annex a certain part (Republika Srpska) of - according to some statements - another country (Bosnia and Herzegovina). It is no coincidence that Viktor Orbán is, in the EU, the most outspoken supporter of Serbian accession to the EU. Besides Slovakia, led by Robert Fico, he would thus gain another EU-sceptic ally within the EU, with Budapest, Bratislava and Belgrade standing together as the "sand in the machine, a stick between the spokes, a thorn in the flesh".

Brave new Serbian world

The Serbs owe their royal inter-war and post-war socialist Yugoslavia to the idea of Greater Serbia. And it was exactly this ideal of all Serbs in one state that set the Balkans alight in the 1990s. In the 2000s, the country was forced to retreat as Montenegro withdrew from the remaining confederation, and Kosovo unilaterally declared independence. Finally, Aleksandar Vučic, who came to power in 2014, was the strong-armed authoritarian leader with Orbán-like traits that most Serbs had been waiting for since Slobodan Milošević passed away in a cell in The Hague. And it was Vučic who came up with the streamlined, 21st century concept of a Greater Serbia, the so-called Serbian World.

There is an uncanny resemblance to the Russian world, which would unite and protect people of Russian nationality and language abroad by cultural, political and military means, where possible. The concept of the Serbian World is not necessarily about territorial expansion either, but rather about a kind of cultural and political influence in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Montenegro, which are also inhabited by Serbs.

And the Serbian world is also good for covering up domestic political problems, which indeed exist. Since the tragedy in Novi Sad, there have been ongoing protests in major Serbian cities, with students and teachers going on strike as well. It is difficult to predict the upcoming developments, if only because the country has experienced many major protests in recent years, which have always ended with Aleksandar Vučic or his party winning the next elections with confidence.

Serbia-Kosovo land swap could be back on the agenda

The Kosovar parliament unilaterally declared independence in 2008. Serbia no longer exercised sovereignty over the province, which was under international administration after the 1999 NATO bombing. Serbia has not recognised the independence of the territory mostly inhabited by Albanians, nor have Slovakia, Romania or Spain, which also have significant minorities of their own. (So far, 104 countries have recognised Kosovo's independence, including Hungary, the 29th state to do so in 2008.)

The declaration of independence has not resolved the ethnic tensions between the two countries, and there are ongoing conflicts, sometimes with fatalities. The percentage of Serbians living in Kosovo is minimal, but they live largely in a block in the north of the country and do not consider Kosovo their homeland, just as Bosnian Serbs do not do so with Bosnia and Herzegovina. A similar proportion of Albanians live in Serbia's Presevo Valley, which borders Kosovo. In both areas, 50-100,000 Serbs and Albanians may be living as minorities.

John Bolton, Donald Trump's former chief national security adviser, floated the idea of a possible land swap back in 2008. The stakes at the time were that Serbia would gain EU membership and Kosovo UN membership through mutual recognition. Bolton precisely said that the US would not stand in the way of such an agreement. (A land swap is a logical solution to this type of conflict at first glance, but the hitherto majority population would suddenly become a minority, and there is a high chance that they would have no choice but to move en masse. Not to mention that it sets a dangerous and bad precedent in Europe.)

John Bolton has since broken ties with Trump, so we will not see him in the new administration again, unlike Richard Grenell. Under Trump's previous term, he was acting director of national intelligence and ambassador to Germany. And he was the presidential special envoy for the Serbia-Kosovo dialogue, who wanted quick results in that area but ultimately failed to deliver a 21st century border revision; it was then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel who stopped Serbia, which was then closer to the EU.

Contrary to expectations, Grenell did not become secretary of state, but instead he will act as presidential envoy for special missions from Venezuela to North Korea, including, no doubt, Kosovo. Grenell and Vučic have formed closer ties in recent years, with the American visiting Belgrade at least three times between 2020 and 2024, and even receiving the Order of the Serbian Flag, a decoration that both Peter Szijjártó and his Russian counterpart and friend Sergei Lavrov can boast of. The Serbian president also included Kosovo in his tribute.

And that's not all. Grenell is a business partner of Jared Kushner, Trump's influential son-in-law. Their investment firm is building a luxury hotel on the site of the ruins of the Yugoslav defence ministry building bombed by NATO planes in 1999. Kushner and Vučic have personally negotiated the construction.The project includes plans for a monument to the victims of the "NATO aggression", which falls in the absurd category.

Grenell has been consistent in supporting the Serbs in recent years. He has called rumours of the march on the borders in September 2023 a lie and opposed the UN resolution on the Srebrenica genocide - as has Péter Szijjártó.

Serbs would leave Bosnia and Herzegovina

Like Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Milorad Dodik in Republika Srpska has put everything on Trump’s victory. He believed that a victory for the Republican candidate could create the conditions for a declaration of independence, i.e. actual unification with Serbia, leaving Bosnia and Herzegovina behind.

In fact, Bosnia and Herzegovina is not a simple country, its economy is in ruins and it owes its existence to the international community. It is made up of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with a Croat-Bosnian majority, and the Republika Srpska, a Bosnian Serb republic. The two entities, with the size of a few counties, and the federal republic all have their own institutions, government and parliament. What is more important is that almost only the Bosniaks, who make up half of the population, consider the country to be their homeland, the Serbs who make up 30% are aligned with Belgrade, and the Croats with 15% follow Zagreb, not Sarajevo. Their towns and villages are decorated with Serbian and Croatian flags.

Dodik, who has been on good terms with both Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin and has been in power since 2006, has been threatening to chop up Bosnia for years, deliberately weakening the common institutions, but has not yet dared to abandon them. (In 2021, for example, the Republika Srpska parliament passed legislation to withdraw from federal institutions such as the armed forces or the judiciary, which eventually turned into the creation of their own pharmaceutical agency - but this too was eventually postponed.)

A symbolic event related to the aforementioned Serbian World was the All-Serbian Assembly in June 2024, jointly attended by the Serbian government and that of Republika Srpska. They jointly criticised the Dayton peace agreement that gave life to Bosnia and Herzegovina, calling for the abandonment of Bosnian institutions and, in essence, the break-up of the country. Belgrade has not previously interfered in affairs of Bosnia and Herzegovina to this extent (with regard to Kosovo, they said that it was an inseparable part of Serbia.)

The Balkans could also become a battleground for a clash between the US and the EU, with the latter being interested in keeping the status quo. But the EU itself is also divided on the issue, and it might be Orbán and his excellent relations with Trump, Vučic and Dodik, that may have a privileged role in pushing through US interests.

(The main sources used for this article are: Trump’s tinderbox: US politics and the next war in the Balkans – ecfr.eu; Richard Grenell, a favoured figure of Serbian authorities: A man who has a solution for everything – n1info.rs; Cast no shadow: How the EU can advance the Kosovo-Serbia dialogue process – ecfr.eu)