EU incentive will calm Serbian relations with region

Significance

While building good-neighbourly relations in the Balkans requires painstaking efforts, the hard work can be undone extremely quickly. Hence the alarm in many Western capitals over Belgrade’s attempt to send a passenger train into northern Kosovo without consulting Pristina, prompting the latter to despatch special police to block the train, and risking an armed stand-off. The incident came after some surprisingly sharp rhetoric from the Serbian foreign minister directed at Macedonia and Montenegro.

Impacts

• Relations with Kosovo will remain cool and periodically tense despite ongoing negotiations on ‘normalising’ relations.
• Turbulence will mark relations with Croatia as political elites in both countries bait each other to score nationalist points domestically.
• Other relationships will be much better, although in Bosnia, Belgrade will struggle to support Banja Luka without antagonising Sarajevo.