What happened to the Dialogue with a small d?

To Embassies of France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union in Serbia, regarding your Joint Statement on the Referendum:

Your Excellencies,?

Without going into the merits of Serbia’s referendum on constitutional changes, something that much better experts than me have discussed lately, I am more interested in the merits and consistency of your Joint Statement and in what you refer to as European standards.

Before I get into that, let's take a small step back. At the time when the South Africa’s apartheid regime just started to present the first signals of its demise, white moderates pushed for reforms that would ease up the discrimination against the black population. There was a big problem, though. The parliamentary committee in charge of the reforms’ discussion was exclusively white. Consequently, no matter how good the proposals were in their merits, they became unacceptable for the ones who were supposed to benefit from them. Lack of inclusion meant that the discrimination practices endure, and they’d be back to square one. Anyone surprised by that?

The purpose of this short historical reminder is not to make any apartheid analogy, but to point out something that most likely you and I commonly share and believe in. Here it goes.

The importance to be included in the process, to shape it, to negotiate, to engage in a dialogue, together it all leads to an outcome where each side gets to develop a sense of responsibility and ownership over the outcome. This too becomes of extreme significance for the implementation of the final outcome, but the process itself is as important as the outcome. And inclusion and dialogue are the cornerstones of that process, they are central features of your democracy that you rightfully cherish a lot; as a matter of fact, of any decent society that values trust. Dialogue, negotiations that lead to a compromise are the fundamental values around which the entire European integration project is being built, I choose to believe. That is why I wholeheartedly support my country’s burdensome EU accession goal.

So, when you assert in your Joint Statement, “[w]e believe that these reforms are a step forward towards Serbia’s alignment with European standards and will support Serbia’s EU accession process”, one cannot help but wonder where do those standards start and where do they end?

Then you go on to state, “we have encouraged all Serbian citizens to take part in the referendum”, but did you uphold the same standards when it came to “encouraging” the Serbian government to secure the space for the open and much needed dialogue on those fundamental issues? Or the standard of dialogue became of secondary importance somewhere along the way??

In the time when the world, including your countries, suffers from yet another troublesome global pandemic called political polarization, when the Serbian government systematically evades and distorts any meaningful dialogue, keeps the institutions and state captured and ridicules any notion of separation of powers, when its citizens are disoriented and blinded by the media darkness, why do you chose to speak up and add the fuel to the fire surrounding such a contentious issue????

Interestingly enough, the very same high standards of dialogue mentioned above become of utmost importance when you “call upon”, in the third paragraph of your Joint Statement, “[…] to engage constructively in the EU-facilitated Dialogue”. Why double standards? Promoting and encouraging, demanding if you want, high standards of dialogue across the entire political spectrum is the diplomacy worthy Joint Statements and a good place to start from. Half-hatched contradictory Joint Statements serve no one and maybe, just maybe sometimes it is better to keep it for yourself.

Unless somehow the Dialogue doesn’t really imply dialogue. That would shake up the values foundation.

Truly yours,

Nikola M. ?ivkovi?

Professor of Foreign Policy, European Affairs & Negotiations

p. s. the South Africa apartheid analogy and the entire approach to dialogue and negotiations, I didn’t come up with that. It comes from the world's most prominent negotiation experts Roger Fisher and William Ury, who established the so-called Harvard or Principled Negotiation method and Project in their seminal book “Getting to Yes”. Most likely you have heard of it, if not read it.