Which way the wind blows: democracy promotion and international actors in Serbia

Abstract

This article seeks to fill an empirical void in the discourse on democracy promotion (DP) with a case study of democracy promotion assistance to Serbia since 1991. Before 2000, political decisions by the US government to hasten the end of the Milošević regime elevated democracy promotion from a secondary consideration during a wartime humanitarian crisis to primary importance, and overall American resource commitments to democracy promotion sectors overtook European funding. The end of the Milošević regime in October 2000 marked the fundamental alteration of the rationale for democracy promotion assistance: international donors virtually flooded Serbia with money to seize a perceived window of opportunity to boost efforts at democratization of the new order. Serbia's democratization became less of a priority for the US government after 9/11. The tasks of political stabilization and integration of Serbia into the European Union (EU) returned European funding to prominence, alongside a few private US foundations. The central observation is that funding priorities within democracy promotion differ from year to year, sometimes dramatically and often for reasons unrelated to the evolving context in Serbia itself, while the overall amount of external democracy promotion funding to Serbia as a gradually democratizing non-EU state is decreasing. Nevertheless, this unstable ground also yielded useful innovation, such as the Balkan Trust for Democracy, a successful trans-Atlantic public private partnership to fund locally driven democracy promotion.