Mapping the Global Balkans: Sovereignty, Governmentality and the Practices of Serbia's Encounters with Emerging Economies and the EU

Mapping the Global Balkans: Sovereignty, Governmentality and the Practices of Serbia's Encounters with Emerging Economies and the EU by Dunja Apostolov-Dimitrijević A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science with Specialization in Political Economy Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario © 2020 Dunja Apostolov-Dimitrijević i Mapping the Global Balkans: Sovereignty, Governmentality and the Practices of Serbia's Encounters with Emerging Economies and the EU ABSTRACT --- Seen as simultaneously a part of Europe and not-yet-fully European, as a liminal space straddling the borderlands of Europe, the Western Balkans usually appear as peripheral within the international order. Measured against the continuing centrality of the EU to wider international economic and (to a lesser extent) political relations, the region is often seen as falling short of the necessary associations and global connections. Yet, the rise of new powers and groupings, such as the BRICS countries, has crystalized Western Balkan imbrications and active participation in global politics. Using Serbia as my case study and China and Russia as emerging economies of focus, this dissertation traces the logics and practices of the latter processes. It argues that Serbia’s integration into global network formations is constituted through a series of interplays between sovereign-reign and economic-governmental forms of reason. The region’s global engagements are constituted through a “Balkan-style” signature of power that brings into play (and blends), simultaneously, concessions and augmentations of sovereignty alongside (neo)liberal/biopolitical governmentality and glorifies both of these in a national(ist) praxeology. ii Acknowledgements I would like to thank Hans-Martin Jaeger for his counsel and thoughtful feedback in writing this dissertation. Srdjan Vucetic has provided me with invaluable direction. I am especially appreciative of Sanja, Aleksandar, Nikola and Afsheen, without whose sustained encouragement, sacrifice and patience this research project would likely not have been completed. To my friends and colleagues in Ottawa, Toronto and Belgrade, thank you for uplifting my spirits throughout. I am grateful for the Doctoral Fellowship I received from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and for the Ernst Mach Grant from the Austrian Agency for International Cooperation in Education and Research. Part of this dissertation was written at the Centre for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz – I am thankful to them for the support. Dr. Dusan Reljic, of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, was an invaluable interlocutor in the field and I am indebted to him for the time he has taken to correspond with me over the years. Lastly, I want to acknowledge Dr. Elzbieta Drazkiewicz- Grodzicka for her mentorship during my research stay at Maynooth University. iii Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iii 1. Introduction 5 2. EU Accession in the Western Balkans: Governance through Interplays of 53 Freedom and Domination 3. Between East and West: The Geopolitical Habitus and the National Sense- 75 making of Serbia’s Global Engagements 4. Constructing the Global Balkans: Transnational Roads and Rails through State 107 Developmentalist Reason 5. Power and Politics at the “Margins” 135 Bibliography 149 iv 1. Introduction Excluded from the international community following close to a decade of civil war, the Western Balkans are still widely regarded as disconnected and marginal – as the “borderlands of Europe” (Duffield, 2001) to be policed and reformed.1 Whether in the popular media, academic or public policy literature, knowledge production on the region has been overwhelmingly confined to the region’s relationship with Europe, specifically its shortcomings in implementing the European Union’s (EU) reform program. As with other spaces and places located outside the West, underlying much of the writing on the Western Balkans is a binary between the latter and Europe, with Europe representing the standard against which the region is defined and evaluated (see Chakrabarty, 2000). This hierarchical relationship has in turn lead to conclusions that the Balkans are the most nationalist and primordial, least cosmopolitan and “enlightened” region in Europe and therefore in need of the EU's "civilizing" influence. Yet, while the region's efforts at EU integration have consumed academic and public policy attention, less noted are the region’s connections with spaces and places outside EUrope. Less attention has been devoted to the political, economic and social connections that have been 1 Wary of cultural and political essentialisms often associated with “the Balkans,” I am interested in exploring the region referred to as the “Western Balkans” as a site of global connectivity. Geographically, the label refers to six out of the seven countries of the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Kosovo [under United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244/99]) plus Albania. While all of these but Albania have the experience of common statehood, the European Union effectively invented the region as a political and economic entity through the Regional Approach and then more formally through the Stabilization and Association Process (Elbassani; 2008), a policy framework that grouped the eight states together and offered the prospect of EU membership provided that they satisfy a common set of conditions. These conditions were designed to address the challenges said to be specific to and faced by all eight states – and thus provided the basis for the differentiation and creation of the Western Balkans as coherent and distinct from “the Balkans” more generally. As my aim is to understand the global network formations in the post-Yugoslav space in the context of the latter’s relationship with the EU – and thus, in the context of the regional and global political processes within which it is embedded – I have chosen to use the “Western Balkan” label because it emerged from, and is an effect of, these same processes and practices. 5 established between the region and various so-called “emerging economies,”2 such as the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), MINTs, (Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey) or the Gulf states. Some of these connections are reviving old ties, such as those between Russia and Serbia, or between Turkey and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Others are newer in nature, such as those with China and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and represent new sources of economic development for the region. Relationships range from diplomatic cooperation, investments in strategic industries, and logistical and infrastructure projects that link the Balkan peninsula with Central Europe, the Middle East and North Africa (Poulain, 2011), to initiatives that are more spontaneous in nature, such as the formation of the Chinese diaspora (ibid.; Korac, 2013). In certain instances, relations with emerging economies are reviving transnational projects with imperial histories and legacies, such as those associated with pan- Slavism and neo-Ottomanism. In others, as is the case with the states of the Gulf and China, modernist-developmental solidarities are being mobilized. Therefore, measured against EU associations, the region may fall short of the EU's insertion in the global political economy. However, these growing ties with emerging economies, established through a variety of cultural, economic and diplomatic connections, suggest a higher degree of connectivity, a more “global Balkans,” than is usually perceived. By exploring the nature of the region’s global encounters, this research project makes three main contributions. First, in bringing to light the Western Balkans’ relations with rising global powers and therefore their participation in the shifts that have come to characterize global politics, the region can be reconceptualised as something other than the “the periphery of the 2 I use scare quotes here to acknowledge both the social construction of the “emerging economy” label and the multiform historical trajectories of the respective states, which may be more accurately captured by the term (re)emerging. I nonetheless employ the “emerging economies” label throughout the dissertation in continuity with the popular understanding of the nature of the presence of the respective states on the global stage. 6 periphery of Europe” (Bechev, 2012). Second, with respect to the conventional assumption that global and transnational networks are voluntary, horizontal and rooted in civil society (e.g. Keck and Sikkink, 1998; Castells, 2000a; Khagram et. al. 2000; Rosenau, 2002), my research will highlight the strategic, state-sponsored processes through which the latter are created and maintained. 3 Moreover, while networks are predominantly regarded as devolving power from the state (ibid.; Castells 2000b), this project will detail how statehood may be strengthened in the context of networked connections. Third, by examining the power logics constitutive of emerging economy engagements in the Western Balkans, my research brings forth a richer understanding of emerging economies than is provided by accounts (see Naim, 2007; Ikenberry, 2011) which view them as either straightforward challengers or endorsers of the status quo. Argument

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