Courtesy of Tim, I’ve now discovered the revamped website of the European Stability Initiative. I have an inherent distrust of think tanks, and if you suffer from Balkan Derangement Syndrome then you’ll hate their politics, but I was loving this report which pointed out that Montenegro
is a country without an ethnic majority, two Orthodox churches and no agreed name for the language most of its people speak. The national currency of independent Montenegro is the Euro. Its 620,000 citizens are Orthodox Montenegrins and Orthodox Serbs, Muslim Bosniaks, Catholic and Muslim Albanians, as well as some Croats and other minorities. Upon re-establishing statehood, Montenegro drastically downsized the armed forces it inherited from the joint state with Serbia to 2,500 and destroyed all except one of its 62 tanks.
If that’s the definition, then I guess Montenegro is indeed a post-modern nation, although I’m not sure that ESI have really understood what post-modern means. Independent Montenegro is a really strange beast, but the Balkans isn’t short on those – Bosnia or Kosovo, anybody?
The difference, I think, is in the attitude of the people who live in those strange beasts. In Bosnia, nobody is convinced that it can work (based on fairly solid evidence) while in Kosovo, everybody is convinced that it can work (despite all the evidence to the contrary). In Montenegro, people are just bewildered – they’ve got this independent country, but they’re just not sure what to do with it.
The ESI report (as one might expect of an initiative to promote European stability) is generally upbeat, talking about the relative success of the economy and pointing out that it seems to have avoided the sort of tensions that have plagued (for example) Macedonia. As the report says, the motor of the economy is tourism (with its knock-on effects in other sectors), but tourism is by no means an unalloyed good, as we heard in the recent BBC segment.
More pointedly, tourism can be an extremely volatile sector. When tastes change, the fortunes of a particular destination can change with them. When money is tight, tourism is one of the first sectors to feel the pinch. Negative political or security developments can wipe out a tourist destination overnight.
So Montenegro needs to generate a wider economic base, which everybody agrees upon. Almost everything I need to buy here is imported, and the locally-produced items that are available aren’t the best quality. It’s less to do with Montenegro’s size – Slovenia isn’t exactly a giant, but it still has brands like Gorenje (useful!) and Fructal (tasty!) – and more about the legacy of the post-Yugoslavia years. The economy ground to a standstill, smuggling became the main economic activity, and recovering from a situation like that is never going to be easy.
The ESI report doesn’t really have any proposals for how to address these issues, or even a solid case for calling Montenegro a “success story” – it really is too early to tell, given that it only became a country at the end of last year. Personally I’m relatively optimistic about Montenegro; given some better urban planning, decent political leadership and the right regional conditions, things could go very well. Unfortunately those three things aren’t too much in evidence right now, so maybe I’m more like the optimistic Kosovars than the pessimistic Bosnians.