BASIC DETERMINANTS OF DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS OF SERBIA AND THE USA
BASIC DETERMINANTS OF DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS OF SERBIA AND THE USA

Summary/Abstract: Bilateral diplomatic relations between two countries are of exceptional importance for the overall political, economic, technical and technological development of a country. They have an impact on the cultural, sociological and wider milieu, and sometimes much more than that. Namely, those relationships can greatly influence the overall development of a society. This especially applies to relations, when one of these countries plays a decisive role in the determinants of the entire world development and the further direction of world social and economic movements. The analysis of bilateral Serbian-American relations all the more deserves special attention, where the clarification of the historical context of those relations can reflect certain trends in the further development of Serbian society itself, especially, if we take a relatively long period of over one hundred and forty years including a large number of changes, primarily Serbian statehood. This topic gains its complexity when all the challenges in that period of its organization from monarchy to republic, through changes in the ideological patterns of socialism and liberal capitalism, federative organization with a multi-national composition, up to the current status of the Republic of Serbia with autonomous provinces in its composition. In fact, the status of one of them - the province of Kosovo - is an open question, not so much for Serbia as for the USA, which in the last decade of the last century, in the majority of the Serbian professional and scientific public is of the opinion that the USA has become the patron of the independence of this entity and one of the the biggest proponents of Kosovo’s independence, especially in the context of its integration into the European Union, where the Republic of Serbia sees itself. Today, in the form of a French-German proposal to resolve the status of relations between Belgrade and Pristina, the fact that the main initiative is the American side’s, insisting on resolving the status of Kosovo within that framework, is becoming increasingly apparent, even though there is a UN Resolution that clearly indicates respect for the principles of international public law regarding respect for the territorial sovereignty of the Republic of Serbia. The current moment, in which the Ukrainian crisis has united the Western allies to respect this principle on the occasion of the self-declaration of the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk republics, is a definite test for all of them that the principles of public international law regarding the inviolability of territorial integrity and integrity are consistently respected for all countries, and not on a selective basis. The role of the USA is extremely important in this sense, and the task of both the Serbian leadership and the Serbian diplomats is to be the biggest spokesmen for the principled application of international law. The US-led NATO attack on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999 was a dangerous precedent in recent history. Later, the recognition of Kosovo without the consent of the mother country, starting with America, and then by most of the countries of the European Union, is another precedent that already seriously changes the standards. The consequences of this can already be seen in the secession of several entities without the consent of the mother country, accompanied by war events, whose the end is hard to predict at this moment. Therefore, the role of the USA has always been crucial, not only in the world context but also in the current diplomatic relations with Serbia.

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