The Lost Sandžak: The forgotten region of Serbia and Montenegro

David Madden (Senior Member, St Antony's College, Oxford)

On 10 February, Kenneth Morrison and Elizabeth Roberts gave a seminar at SEESOX with the above title, to mark the appearance of their book “The Sandzak: A History”. David Madden chaired. Kenneth set the scene for the undertaking: the first detailed history written in English. Since the Sandzak was not a state or autonomous entity, it had no archives. It was terra incognita: but a unique political and cultural space.

Elizabeth set out the history up to 1918. The Sandžak was a small region with changing borders and regular population shift. There was a mixed Orthodox/Moslem population (currently roughly 32%/60%). Its network of interconnecting river valleys made it a transit route (for trade, travel, and armies) though the mountains. These factors brought wealth at times but also misery e.g. during the Ottoman/Hapsburg wars of the 17th and 18th centuries. One constant was that this small wedge of territory provided a vital connecting corridor between Istanbul and the frontier provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, while for Vienna it stood in the way of the coming together of Serbia and Montenegro. The Sandžak gained heightened importance, and attracted increased outside attention in the period between the 1878 Congress of Berlin and the 1912/1913 Balkan Wars. Austria-Hungary, having occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina under the terms of the Berlin Treaty, chose merely to garrison the Sandžak while leaving it under Ottoman administration. When Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908 they sought to blunt international protests at Vienna’s expansionism by withdrawing their garrisons from the Sandžak, allowing the territory to revert to full Ottoman control. At the same time the Austrian Foreign Minister, Alois von Aehrenthal, was able to allay the misgivings of the military hawks over the Ottomans’ inability to resist Serbian and Montenegrin aggrandisement by arguing that Vienna should focus on subjugating Serbia rather than seeking to bolster their presence in the Sandžak. Ironically Vienna’s decision, which took no account of continuing Ottoman decline, allowed Serbia and Montenegro to gain a common border when they defeated the Ottomans in the ensuing Balkan War of 1912. One of the cardinal principles of Austria-Hungary’s policy in the Balkans had been undermined; Serbian nationalism had been strengthened rather than tamed.

Greece: Taking stock - economic and financial changes since the onset of the global and euro area crises

Francisco Torres (Santander Visiting Fellow, St Antony's College, Oxford)
Jonathan Scheele (ESC Visiting Fellow, St Antony's College, Oxford)

On 17 February Eleni Dendrinou-Louri, Deputy Governor of the Bank of Greece, spoke at a SEESOX seminar organised in association with PEFM. The session was chaired by Max Watson, PEFM Director, and Francisco Torres, Santander Visiting Fellow, was discussant

On the economy and economic adjustment, she characterised the pre-crisis period from 2001 to 2008 as a low inflation and low interest rate environment, with negligible spreads vis-à-vis German government bonds but large and growing fiscal and external imbalances.

On the fiscal front, the deficit was almost continuously above 5% of GDP, worsening considerably from 2007 onwards. At the same time, those fiscal imbalances were structural, given the unfunded pension system, the lack of budgetary controls in healthcare, the weak tax administration and poor collection rates, the large underground economy and the clientelist political system.

On the competitiveness front the situation was no better, with Greece losing competitiveness by about 30% against its trading partners between 2001 and 2009. The current account deficit widened significantly between 2001 and 2008 and the relative price of non-tradables increased substantially. Greece ranked worst in the euro area as regards its twin deficits – budget and current account. Thus ‘the debt crisis was an accident waiting to happen’. Spreads sky rocketed and gave rise to self-fulfilling debt dynamics, resulting in a debt-GDP ratio of 176.2% in 2013.

Whatever happened with Transition in Central and Eastern Europe?

Jonathan Scheele (ESC Fellow, St Antony's College, Oxford)

Alina Mungiu-Pippidi is a regular visitor to SEESOX and, as always, gave us a thought-provoking evening and material for much further work. Last year she spoke about corruption in the new EU Member States, but this time she developed some of her earlier work on transition, in particular her 2009 paper “The Other Transition”[1]. There, she had argued that the history of the post-communist transition could be rewritten as a renegotiation of a social contract between state and society after Communism.

Now, 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Alina felt it was time to re-examine the whole issue of transition. Among a list of questions to be answered was whether “transition” still deserved a word for itself. Are ‘transition’ and modernisation synonyms? How does transition relate to development and is it a necessary stage? When can we consider transition as accomplished? And once it is accomplished, is it sufficient for development? Are some transition policies more successful than others? And what is the share of policies and institutions in shaping transitions?

The Eurozone crisis: An insider’s view from Cyprus

Androulla Kaminara (Academic Visitor, St Antony's College, Oxford)

On the 27th of January Dr Michael Sarris[1] gave a very lucid account into the functioning of the Eurogroup, as was experienced by the Cypriot delegation during the two meetings of March 2013. The first meeting resulted in a decision for a bail-in of Cypriot banks by all depositors and the second decision of bail-in from depositors with deposits of over 100,000 euro.

He highlighted that the current narrative is based on looking only at some of the symptoms of what is wrong with the European construction and not at the underlying problems. He believes that many Member States took seriously the benefits of the Eurozone and less seriously the obligations emanating from being a member.  However the Eurozone architectural construction had shortcomings that were not addressed, as for example, the lack of a mechanism to control imbalances, in both surplus and deficit countries. “When we realised that they were a lot of fires burning – we concentrated on rules to avoid new fires from developing, rather than to put out existing fires.”  Crisis mismanagement and a faulty decision making process are at the heart of the Eurozone’s continuing troubles.

Will the opening of EU accession be a game-changer in Serbian politics, and what should we expect?

Jessie Hronesova (St Antony's College, Oxford)

On the eve of Serbia’s long-awaited opening of EU accession negotiations, Milica Delevic and Peter Sanfey from the EBRD started off the Hilary SEESOX Seminar Series by pinpointing the most pressing political and economic challenges lying ahead of Serbia’s European accession path.

Milica Delevic, the Deputy Secretary General for Shareholders Relations of the EBRD, noted that Serbia has gone through a long and tortuous road to membership since the fall of the regime of Slobodan Milosevic in October 2000. There had been some crucial milestones over the 14-year long process of securing Serbia’s candidacy, such as the first meeting of the Consultative Task Force in July 2001, the signing of the Stabilization and Association Agreement in 2007, visa liberalization in 2009, and finally the green light given by the EU in December 2013 to open negotiations on the 21st January 2014.

Q&A with Tryfon Bampilis: The far right in Greece: Dawn or Dusk?

Tryfon Bampilis (A.G. Leventis Visiting Fellow, St Antony's College, Oxford)

What are the facts about the Golden Dawn party in Greece? Is it a neo-Nazi party? What can we expect in the future? These and other very interesting questions were discussed during a seminar organized by SEESOX[1] at St Antony’s College, Oxford that took place on the 22nd of October where A.G Leventis/SEESOX visiting fellow Dr. Tryfon Bampilis presented the preliminary findings of his research. Below is an account of the presentation and discussion in the form of questions and answers.

1. What facts are known about the Golden Dawn party of Greece?

At the Greek legislative elections of Sunday 17th of June 2012, a spine chilling result caught everyone’s attention. For the first time ever in post-1974 Greece, an extreme right wing party secured 6.92% or 425.990 of the votes, which gave it 18 Members of Parliament. In a country torn apart by a post-WWII civil war and with the 1967-74 memory of a military dictatorship, this electoral result looked like an irony of history, one of the darkest hours of Greek democracy. These electoral results were especially surprising as the party had received a mere 0.29% in the 2009 elections and in the meantime had intensified its racist attacks against immigrants in various areas of Athens. The notorious violence of the members of Golden Dawn became even more visible just a week before the general elections when Ilias Kasidiaris, the spokesman of the party, physically attacked two female Members of Parliament during a live morning television show.

Summer of discontent: Citizen unrest and the politics of protest in Southeast Europe

Kerem Öktem (Open Society Research Fellow, European Studies Centre, St Antony's College, Oxford)

The summer of 2013 has been marked by significant citizen mobilization almost all over Southeast Europe. The mass protests of Istanbul's Gezi Park and Sofia's Orlov Most stood out. Yet, as we discussed in the workshop 'Citizen unrest and the politics of protest in Southeast Europe', discontent with populist politics and incomplete democracies had been building up all over the region over the last few years. As Gwendolyn Sasse (Nuffield) and Michael Willis (St Antony's) suggested, neither the Eastern and Southeast European protests, nor the Arab Spring uprisings can be understood as sudden outbursts of frustrated segments of society. As a matter of fact, protests don't just happen, they always have a pre-history, as one participant stated. In all cases discussed, a certain path dependence explains how popular discontent is translated into action or the lack thereof. In Algeria, for instance, protests did not take hold despite immediate proximity to Tunisia and economic problems as pressing, because the memory of the destructive Algerian Civil War is still very much alive. In this pre-history, a series of factors matter: From the levels of public sector employment to the content of IMF rescue packages, from public trust prior to the protests to forms of party mobilization, protests are shaped by these factors.