Beogradske nacionalističke frustracije
Belgrade’s Nationalistic Frustration: Frustration of the Defeated

Summary/Abstract: For Serbia’s nationalistic elite the outcome of Montenegro’s referendum independence was the hardest blow ever. The time – the months to come, rather than years – will show that even Kosovo’s “parting” from Serbia will not be so traumatic and dramatic experience as “the betrayal of Serbian brothers,” “the blossom of the Serbian nation.” Nowadays it doesn’t matter much what caused such bitter feelings in the first place – Serbian nationalists’ certainty that something like that could never happen, the sense that on May 21 Montenegro might have finally put to death the longstanding and stubborn Greater Serbia project, or both. Actually, the “national” Belgrade is in shock. Unlike the rest of Serbia that remained rather indifferent to the referendum’s outcome and behaved as if something like that was to be expected. Anyway, hasn’t an outcome as such been systematically prepared in Montenegro and even in Serbia, though without much enthusiasm in the latter? As psychologists would put it, Belgrade is in the zone of specific post-referendum frustration. The loudest advocates of the Serbian Montenegro are experiencing mixed feelings of resignation and disappointment, while those most militant among them cannot hide their revolt, fury and even syndromes of revenge. True, some kind of hope that this is nothing but “an episode,” that actually “nothing of crucial importance has taken place, since Serbia-Montenegro still exists though without a part” (as Milos Aligrudic, high official of the Democratic Party of Serbia put it) and that Montenegro would soon “come to its senses” and “realize it made a hasty decision,” i.e. that it made a strategic, historical, national, political, economic and social mistake when it removed itself from Serbia’s brotherly hug remained in the air. Montenegro acted to its own detriment, say Serbian nationalists. For, ever since 1991 – when Milosevic begun to implement the Memorandum ideology through nationalism and wars, with the hearty support of the then and actual masterminds of Serbian nationalism - from Dobrica Cosic to Ljubomir Tadic, Matija Beckovic and others - and started the tidal wave that swallowed the former Yugoslavia, Serbian nationalists have been deeply convinced that anyone renouncing Serbia would perish in a perspective of history...

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