Serbia and Albania: precarious states in a volatile neighbourhood

A year after the outbreak of the first world war, Grigory Trubetskoy, head of the Near Eastern department of imperial Russia’s foreign ministry, wrote: “Many Serbs sincerely believe that they are the first nation in the world and that they have the best army in Europe. They think the same about their literature and learning.”

Bear in mind that Russia at this time was Serbia’s ally. The tsarist diplomat’s condescension towards the Serbs, recounted in Marko Attila Hoare’s Serbia: A Modern History, serves as a reminder that the ostensibly warm ties today between President Vladimir Putin’s Russia and President Aleksandar Vučić’s Serbia do not tell the whole story.

Moscow cultivates Belgrade as part of its anti-western foreign policy but in the end pursues its own interests. For its part, Serbia balances its relationship with Russia with ties to western democracies and China in an effort to maximise its freedom of manoeuvre.

Hoare’s impressive book, which covers Serbia from the wars of liberation against Ottoman rule in the early 19th century to the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941, draws on his own research as well as a mass of scholarship by Serbian historians. It is the comprehensive history of Serbia that English-speakers have needed for decades — detailed in its narrative, panoramic in scope and penetrating in analysis, much of it relevant to today’s political conditions in the Balkans. Despite undeniable progress since the fall of communism, the region suffers from corruption, organised crime and shortcomings in democracy that combine with ethnic, territorial and historical disputes and great power rivalries to create the impression of difficult times ahead.

The other book under review, Robert Austin’s Royal Fraud, focuses on the life and times of Ahmed Zogu, or King Zog, the colourful, unscrupulous political schemer who ruled Albania in the interwar years. Written with dry humour and a sensitive awareness of Albania’s fragility in this age of rapacious European dictatorships and dithering democracies, Austin’s slim volume opens a window on what he calls the nature of “small state survival”.

Like Marie-Janine Calic in her The Great Cauldron (2019), Hoare and Austin perform a valuable service for readers in resisting the temptation to indulge in clichés about the Balkans as irredeemably backward and plagued with intractable conflicts. If the modern history of Serbia and Albania has been scarred by wars, economic ills and long spells of domestic repression, much of that derives from the precarious independence that each state established amid an unstable neighbourhood and the bullying of larger foreign powers. Nowadays, joining the EU might help — but, despite the new impetus behind the 27-nation bloc’s enlargement project, neither country seems ready, or in Serbia’s case even willing, to enter the club any time soon.

For Serbia’s leaders, a consistent objective in the 19th and 20th centuries was not just to put independence on a firm footing, but to expand the national territory so that various Serb communities scattered across the Balkans could be incorporated into one state. Hoare, a history professor at the Sarajevo School of Science and Technology, explains that this goal raised several difficulties. In the first place, many Serbs lived side by side with other peoples, so conflicts with neighbouring states became likely. Secondly, not all South Slavs identified by Serbia as Serbs — Macedonians and Muslim Bosniaks are cases in point — regarded themselves as such, or wanted to be ruled from Belgrade.

The same applied to Albanians, who are not Slavs, but who lived in areas coveted by Serbia — above all, Kosovo, viewed in Belgrade as the historical cradle of Serbian identity. Here lie the origins of today’s troubles over Kosovo, acquired by Serbia in 1912 and independent, though not recognised by Belgrade, since 2008. Similarly, the incorporation of Croatia into the post-1918 polity known as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes — the Yugoslav state viewed by many in Belgrade as a kind of Greater Serbia — led to permanent, often violent tensions between Serbs and Croats.

No less important, however, is the point Hoare makes throughout his book: as Serbia expanded in size, “newly acquired territories increased the scope of regimes for arbitrary, authoritarian behaviour”. Democracy was too often sacrificed on the altar of the national idea. The pattern was to repeat itself in the 1990s as communist Yugoslavia broke up and Slobodan Milošević, the Serbian nationalist strongman, pursued the same vision of gathering all Serbs in one state, trampling on democratic values in the process.

The centrepiece of Hoare’s book is his gripping account of the 1903 conspiracy that led to the assassinations of King Aleksandar and his queen, Draga Mašin, a former royal lady-in-waiting. Hoare quotes the historian Dubravka Stojanović: “That crime of 1903 is the founding crime.” It foreshadowed the intercommunal Yugoslav violence of the second world war and the 1990s, as well as the murder in 2003 of Zoran Đinđić, a rare postcommunist example of a reformist liberal rising to be Serbian prime minister. Hoare writes: “One principle established by the [1903] putsch would hang like a curse over Serbia: that in the aim of achieving ‘patriotic’ goals, objectively criminal acts could legitimately be carried out without the perpetrators being held accountable.”

Austin, a University of Toronto scholar, observes that Zog, who served as interior minister, prime minister and president before making himself king in 1928, did little to modernise Albania but was successful in “having almost all of his opponents murdered, mostly in broad daylight in foreign countries”. He was no ranting orator like Hitler or Mussolini, but he was known for his “laziness and love of pomp”.

When he decided he needed a queen, ideally an American, he placed an advertisement in the press: “The King of Albania, Ahmet Zog the First, is seeking a wife from the United States of America who is also independently wealthy. While a level of beauty is helpful, the annual income required for the Queen is 1 million USD per year.”

For all his faults, Zog was not as tyrannical as Enver Hoxha, the Stalinist who ruled Albania from 1944 to 1985, all but sealing it off from the world and earning notoriety as eastern Europe’s most vicious communist dictator. Austin also credits Zog and Albanians in general with refusing to join the Nazi-led mass persecution of Jews — unlike others in eastern Europe in the 1940s.

Terrible suffering and misrule mark the modern history of Serbia and Albania, and the peoples of both countries surely deserve a better future. The books of Hoare and Austin are excellent accounts of how the traumas of the past have left deep traces on each country.

Serbia: A Modern History by Marko Attila Hoare Hurst, £65, 720 pages

Royal Fraud: The Story of Albania’s First and Last King by Robert C Austin Central European University Press, £20.95, 158 pages

Tony Barber is the FT’s European Comment Editor