Towards a coalition of common sense

Written for Kosovo Online by Srdjan Garcevic, founder of The Nutshell Times

During the recent interview of Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić with Donald Trump Jr, both the host and the interviewee agreed on the importance of pursuing "common sense" in politics and culture.

Indeed, the extraordinary popularity of the MAGA movement in Serbia lies in our experience that zealous pushing of progressive values fails even in their stated purpose and devolves into corruption, coercion, and lawlessness.

The most obvious examples are the elites in Priština and Sarajevo. Despite being generously funded and protected by the USA and Western Europe for over three decades to build more "equitable" and "diverse societies," they only manage to veer into nationalist extremism, albeit often disguised in progressive jargon, which undermines the multicultural nature of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo and Metohija.

More tragically for their donors, they also failed to foster institutions and economies to support their bluster, as seen in the inability to conduct fair elections in the case of Priština authorities and the escalation of rhetoric and lawfare against Republika Srpska by those in Sarajevo.

On top of threatening to destabilize the region, both are a drag on the political and financial resources of those supporting them externally, many of whom are still willing to pay as they are locked into the progressive zealotry that characterized the post-Cold War West. Another case of saber-rattling of the remaining progressive zealots in Europe to keep the tensions up in the region and prevent any development is the recent announcement of the intention of Croatia and Albania to create a military alliance and include "Kosovo" as well as potentially Bulgaria.

These moves in Sarajevo, Priština, Zagreb, Tirana, and, ultimately, Brussels, are an expression of fear of the fact that progressive interventionism and payments to uphold failing projects abroad were, once again, like in 2016, rejected at the American ballot box.

To counterbalance this, as well as broader destabilizing tendencies in Europe, it would make sense to create a coalition of European countries that share a commonsensical approach with the MAGA movement, such as Italy, Hungary, Northern Macedonia, and Serbia - and the US. The principles would be devotion to the security, freedom, and well-being of own citizens, embrace of pragmatic solutions that would allow the societies to prosper, and avoidance of costly and dangerous foreign adventurism. The members would respect each other's sovereignty and differences. They would work to develop New Europe on healthy grounds in the new, more protectionist global context, away from excessive debt and costly projects that led to the deindustrialization of Europe and the USA.

This idea has been tried whenever tensions between Western Europe and Russia have arisen, threatening to pull the US into global quagmires. After WWI, the USA supported the Serbia-led Kingdom of Yugoslavia against European powers and the Soviets, and then again cooperated with Socialist Yugoslavia not only to keep it away from the Warsaw Pact but also to manage the decline of European empires in Africa and Asia through the Non-Aligned Movement.

While this new alliance of common sense could also expand to similarly minded governments across the world, it would primarily work to restrain self-destructive tendencies within Europe, which often seek escalation for escalation's sake, whether in the Balkans or Ukraine. Finally, it could also work as a model of genuine multilateralism, where countries truly respect each other's differences and learn and profit from them, and do not try to remake each other into an undifferentiated, yet somehow constantly caustic, mass.