Jacob Mikanowski: evaluation

Transcript context

…Absolutely. It’s one of the funnest Balkan cities. It has reinvented itself as a Balkan party center. It really has this incredible culture of discos and these houseboats on the Danube where people party on. To become a genuine transit hub I guess they would have to make nice with everybody around them and rebuild. It is hard to travel around the Balkans now because there are hardly any long-distance railways. It’s hard to even cross the — I had a terrible time going from Belgrade to Sarajevo because you don’t get sent to Sarajevo, you get sent to the Sarajevo that belongs to Republika Srpska, the Serbian part of Bosnia. If they could resolve all their regional conflicts, then yes, that city is in a perfect position. That’s why it was so strategic for the Ottomans and the Hungarians and the Yugoslavs. But yes, it’s a political issue, and I think it’s one that’s not going to be resolved very quickly. Between the Bosnian problems, between Kosovo, it’s not happening in the short term. However, the Serbian solution is to be close to Russia and China. They have increasingly close links to especially China. Maybe they’re an island of Chinese influence in the Balkans. It’s their future. The Serbian obsession with, I guess you’d have to call it the 14th century: Is it an actual historic obsession or is it a stand-in for some other clash of values? How do you frame that or think about it? So when you ask Serbians about Kosovo, they’ll tell you all these long stories about “the Serbian heartland is in Kosovo” and “Kosovo is Serbia.” Putting aside whether or not one agrees with any of that, what is it that they really mean when they’re saying it?…

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