Jasmin Mujanović says Europe cannot answer force because it was built to reject it. Serbia shows Europe can. It also shows who is made to pay.
by Ngadhnjim Brovina | 2 September 2026
On Wednesday Jasmin Mujanović wrote: "The EU and key capitals like Berlin are unable to respond to Russia's growing attacks on their own security because the EU, as a concept, was founded on an almost ontological rejection of war and violence. Everyone who seriously followed the enlargement debate in the Western Balkans over the past 20 years knew this already. A bloc of 500 million people that is unable to deal with the likes of Dodik or Vucic is not going to be able to stand up to Putin and Xi. Attempts to talk around this simple truth, 'it's not the same!', have always been simple expressions of weakness and ideological and intellectual bankruptcy."
Jasmin Mujanović is a political scientist of Bosnian origin working in North America, the author of "Hunger and Fury" on the region's democratic decay and of "The Bosniaks," a standard study of nationhood after the genocide, and for a decade one of the few English-language voices on the Balkans that Washington and Brussels actually read. He has been saying the same thing about Dodik and Vučić since before it was fashionable, so "everyone who seriously followed the enlargement debate knew this already" is a claim he has standing to make. And he makes the argument from the part of Europe where the proposition has been tested longest, and at the highest cost.
The post makes a causal claim and a predictive one. The cause is constitutional: a community founded to make war unthinkable among its members cannot think it when it arrives from outside. The prediction follows: what fails on Dodik fails on Putin. Both are testable, and the Balkans is the laboratory he names. We take him at his word and run the test.
Begin with the exception, because it is fresh. On 1 September Germany's interior minister named Russia for the Leipzig/Halle drone on three grounds, the police investigation, the pattern of offences and the intelligence findings, and Berlin ordered the consulate general in Bonn closed, raised its threat level and tightened entry for Russian citizens. Kaja Kallas called the attacks "kinetic hybrid" and said the next sanctions package would be the widest yet. That is a response. It is small and it took four weeks, but it exists, and it disproves the strong form of the ontological claim. A community that cannot conceive of force does not close a consulate over a drone with a disconnected trigger.
So the incapacity is not total, and the question becomes where it lives. Mujanović's own sentence supplies the coordinates: Dodik and Vučić. The Union answers force when force reaches a member state's territory. It does not answer force applied, in the Union's name and with the Union's money, to the states the Union has promised to admit.
Serbia is the live example, and the record is recent enough to need no archive. Earlier in August Serbia's president had threatened to divert the Ibër (Ibar) at Ujman (Gazivode), then withdrawn the threat the next day. In the last week of the month his defence minister sat with China's Guo Hongtao in the second session of a bilateral defence subcommittee and thanked Beijing for its arms in a readout that folded Kosovo into the gratitude; the same week the president announced an incendiary device thrown across the border from Kosovo, which Kosovo Police said never crossed and whose promised investigation results never appeared. When Ratko Mladić died, Serbia's justice minister told ATV that a general is a general and "the protocols are known," and that he would be buried with the highest state honours; the government had petitioned the Mechanism for his release while he was dying, its president called the refusal "uncivilised behaviour, without precedent," a plot at Topčider is under discussion, and the bells of the Srebrenica parish rang for him the night he died. On Tuesday, while Berlin closed its consulate, the Serbian president was hosting the Non-Aligned Movement in the Palace of Serbia and his tabloids were explaining Leipzig as a German intelligence provocation.
Set the Union's ledger beside that.
Serbia's alignment with the common foreign policy "remains low," the Commission wrote in November, a sentence it has written in some form for years with no consequence attached. The single financial freeze of 2026 came in the spring, over judicial laws that threatened the Commission's own instruments, and Cluster 3 was recommended for opening in July while the freeze stood. Nowhere in the Facility is there a conditionality line for war-crimes accountability, for archives, for the treatment of neighbours, or for a state funeral. The Union has a mechanism. It used it once, on its own behalf.
Dodik is the same finding at smaller scale. Nothing about him was hidden from Brussels this year: a Medvedev letter shared in February, Zelensky called "an actor performing a comedy while his nation endures a tragedy" in March, Putin's Victory Day reception in May, a Shoigu call at the end of that month. Across all of it the Union never agreed on a single sanction against him, Budapest saw to that, and the Union had no answer to Budapest. The removal from office that finally came in 2025 was the work of a Bosnian court, on a Bosnian statute, and Washington had sanctioned him years before Brussels managed a statement. That is the Union which discovered in August it could process a drone.
Here is the concession, and it revises the thesis rather than defeating it. Mujanović is right that the reflex is constitutional. He has misnamed it. What the Union rejects is cost, and force from outside is answered because the answer is cheap: a consulate, a threat level. Force inside the enlargement space goes unanswered because the answer would mean admitting that twenty years of purchasing stability from the strongest local actor has been financing that actor's force, and that admission is paid for in Brussels, not in Belgrade. "It's not the same" is the sentence a bureaucracy uses when it means "this one would cost us."
The prediction needs the same revision. Leipzig shows the Union can manage Putin at the level of a consulate. A Union that answers Putin on its own soil while paying Vučić next door has already told Moscow where the border of its resolve runs, and Belgrade has been reading those coordinates off the Commission's annual report for years. It read them again on Tuesday, from a front page, while Berlin was demonstrating something less comfortable than Mujanović's thesis. Europe can impose a cost. It has always chosen who pays it.
Ngadhnjim Brovina teaches political science at UBT in Prishtina. He writes on enlargement, conditionality, and the institutional politics of the Western Balkans.
