About 287 times smaller than Russia and 134 times less populous than Germany, the rugged European country of Montenegro huddles on the Adriatic Sea, constantly jostled by superpowers and the forces they unleash. The promise of the Europe that emerged from the Cold War was that small nations like this one could thrive without fear of conquest by larger neighbors. But as Ukraine recently discovered, that promise has always been qualified by reality.
That leaves the question of whether the Europe of the 21st century is, like the Europe of centuries past, fated to domination by vast superpowers, whose standing armies and nuclear arsenals all too easily shatter the dream of a unified continent.
Dritan Abazović doesn’t think so. The 36-year-old prime minister of Montenegro hails from an Albanian minority in a country dominated by ethnic Montenegrins and Serbs. Described by the French newspaper Le Monde as a “phenomenon,” Abazović has tried to engineer a departure — at least rhetorically — from the region’s hidebound politics of grift and ethnic warfare.
More likely to be found striding a bike than lounging in the back of a limousine, he has tried to pull a young country proud of its past — in its modern form, Montenegro became a sovereign nation in 2006, though the fight for independence can be traced back to 1040 — into an uncertain future, a project he has undertaken at a time of tumult unprecedented in Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
“This is a problematic moment,” he told Yahoo News in a recent conversation, “which started with COVID-19. Now, from one crisis, we’re going to another crisis,” he said, referencing the Russian invasion of Ukraine that has rattled a continent in various ways. Though Montenegro is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which has delivered vast reserves of weaponry to Ukraine, neighboring Serbia is one of the Kremlin’s key allies in Europe.
The moment is problematic for Abazović’s own prospects too. Having lost a no-confidence vote last month, one of Europe’s youngest leaders will soon become one of its youngest former leaders. A new government will be formed early next year. Until then, the ambitious young progressive sees himself as relatively unburdened, willing to say the truths others keep to themselves.
“We’re in a perfect storm,” Abazović told Yahoo News from New York, where he recently attended the U.N. General Assembly, describing Europe’s unwillingness to decisively confront Russia as more destabilizing than whatever such confrontation may bring. “I don’t know how they can stop the war with only words; I do not see this possibility in this moment,” he continued. “It needs to be something more concrete.”
Like other younger European leaders (Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine is 44; Sanna Marin of Finland is 36), watched as children or teenagers as the Berlin Wall crumbled and, several years later, the Soviet Union collapsed. But while Germany embraced Western democracy with an inspiring zeal, the nations of the former Yugoslavia, of which Montenegro was a part, reverted to sectarian violence, most notably in the massacre of thousands of Muslims at Srebrenica.
Balkan nations like Montenegro and Albania thus remain on the borderline between past and future. A future rife with international tourists sampling Vranac wines and Silicon Valley technology firms setting up campuses in the capital city of Podgorica is alluring but not necessarily within obvious reach. A $1 billion highway running through Montenegro built by the Chinese turned into a road to nowhere, one that threatens the tiny…
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