Belgrade has spent twenty-five years accusing the West of treating international law as a menu. Its own foreign policy is now the most sustained demonstration in Europe of what selective application looks like in practice.
Mark Gojcaj | 27 May 2026
At the United Nations Security Council this week, under Chinese presidency, Serbian Foreign Minister Marko Đurić delivered the speech Belgrade has been delivering, in one form or another, since 1999. The Charter is being eroded. The principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity are sacred. Resolution 1244 is among the most violated documents the Council has ever adopted. Serbia, Đurić said, remains "the pillar of defense of the UN Charter" and "the strongest bulwark of peace" in the Western Balkans.
The speech was rhetorically calibrated for the room and well received by the delegations it was written to please. It was also a useful occasion to ask a question Belgrade's diplomacy has spent a quarter-century avoiding. If Serbia is the pillar of defense of the Charter, on which table does the Charter actually sit?
Consider the menu.
At the Russia table, Serbia and Moscow agree that Kosovo's independence is the original violation of the post-1945 order. They agree that 1999 was an act of aggression. They agree that territorial integrity is inviolable. On the strength of this shared conviction, Belgrade declines to align with EU sanctions on Russia, declines to condemn the war against Ukraine, and votes carefully at the General Assembly to avoid antagonizing the Kremlin. The principle invoked at this table is that territorial integrity is absolute.
At the Ukraine table, Serbia votes for the General Assembly resolutions affirming Ukraine's territorial integrity. President Vučić has said publicly that Crimea is Ukraine. Belgrade and Kyiv recognize one another's borders. Here too, the absolute principle is territorial integrity, except that here Russia is the violator and Ukraine the victim.
These two tables cannot both be set with the same china. If territorial integrity is absolute, Russia is in flagrant violation of the Charter and sanctions are the minimum response a serious bulwark of the international order would adopt. If territorial integrity is conditional, then the Kosovo case is at the very least arguable. Belgrade escapes the trap by asserting that the Ukrainian case is somehow different, without ever specifying the difference in legal terms. The difference is not legal. It is patronal. Russia is a patron. Ukraine is not. Belgrade has decided which it values more, and the Charter has not been informed.
At the Palestine table, Serbia recognizes the State of Palestine, and Palestine refuses to recognize Kosovo. Both governments invoke territorial integrity and self-determination denied by occupation. The arithmetic works only if Kosovo Albanians are not a people with a right to self-determination, while Palestinians are. The criterion that distinguishes the two cases is never articulated. It cannot be articulated, because the moment it is written down it either applies to Kosovo or it does not apply to Palestine.
At the Israel table, the contortion becomes acrobatic. Vučić has repeatedly described Kosovo as Serbia's Jerusalem, a sacred and inalienable patrimony defined by history and faith rather than demography. Israel recognized Kosovo in 2020 only under direct American pressure as part of the Washington Agreement; left to itself, the Netanyahu government would almost certainly have preserved its non-recognition, and Belgrade's preferred outcome would have held. Vučić has since condemned the American and Israeli strikes on Iran. Israel continues to describe him as a great and true friend. The Jerusalem analogy invites a comparison Belgrade has not thought through. The Jewish claim to the land of Israel rests on a continuous historical presence that predates every subsequent population movement in the region; it is a claim of autochthony interrupted by exile. The Serbian claim to Kosovo is the opposite structure. The Serbs entered Kosovo from the north and east in the centuries following the collapse of Byzantine authority and the disintegration of the First Bulgarian Empire, consolidating their position only with the southward expansion of the Nemanjić state from the late twelfth century. The great monastic foundations in Kosovo are thirteenth and fourteenth century constructions on a landscape that was, on the dominant historiographical reading and on every reading that places Albanian ancestors in the Balkans before the Slavic migrations, already inhabited by the ancestors of today's Albanians. If the Jerusalem analogy means anything, it means that the structural position Belgrade claims for itself in Kosovo is in fact the position occupied by the Albanians. The Serbs in Kosovo occupy the structural position not of the returning Jews but of a later, expanding medieval polity that built sacred sites on land that was not historically theirs first. Belgrade can have the analogy or it can have the history. It cannot have both.
At the Iran table, Vučić condemns the strikes as a violation of sovereignty and a use of force without Security Council authorization. This is the precise language Belgrade has used about NATO in 1999 for a quarter of a century. Applied consistently, the same language condemns the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which Belgrade has never condemned. Iran does not recognize Kosovo. The convergence is not on values.
What, then, is the organizing principle of Serbian foreign policy? It is not territorial integrity, because Belgrade applies it to Ukraine and suspends it for Russia. It is not self-determination, because Belgrade extends it to Palestinians and withholds it from Kosovo Albanians. It is not opposition to unilateral force, because Belgrade condemns it in Iran and tolerates it in Donbas. It is not the Charter, because the Charter is invoked at the Security Council and ignored on its own borders.
The organizing principle, stripped of its diplomatic cladding, is whatever proposition, at this particular table, advances the non-recognition of Kosovo. Every other commitment is subordinate. Every other principle is provisional. The Charter is not a constraint on Serbian policy. It is a flag Belgrade raises and lowers as the wind requires.
What needs to be said plainly, because Đurić's Charter vocabulary is designed to obscure it, is that the Belgrade reading of international law is not merely selective. It is substantive. Under the Belgrade reading, international law is the body of rules under which a population of two million people may be denied basic political rights on the territory where they constitute the overwhelming majority. It is the body of rules under which an apartheid-style administrative order, of the kind operated in Kosovo through the 1990s, qualifies as the lawful exercise of sovereign authority. It is the body of rules under which the campaigns of 1998 and 1999, the mass deportations, the burned villages, the column at Meja, the bodies trucked to Batajnica, are reframed as the legitimate defense of territorial integrity against secessionist terrorism. It is the body of rules under which Srebrenica becomes a matter of disputed characterization, and the indictees of the Hague become defenders of the nation. This is not a hypothetical reading. It is the reading on which a generation of Serbian foreign policy has been built, and it is the reading Đurić was defending, in polished English, at the Security Council last week.
The question Belgrade has been asking the West for twenty-five years is what really is international law. It is a fair question. The answer Belgrade's own diplomacy supplies is uncomfortable for those who ask it. International law, in the Belgrade reading, is a menu. The diner orders differently at every table. The bill, eventually, comes due.
