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Few with a comprehensive understanding of Serbia’s social covenant would promote it as a model mature liberal democracies should emulate.
As admissions against personal interest go, it’s hard to beat the thrall in which gun-control advocates find themselves amid their newfound respect for the model to which all civilized nations should aspire: Serbia.
“Rocked by 2 mass shootings in 2 days,” the NBC News headline read, “this small country chose a different path.” The report extolls the virtues of the Serbian civic compact, which witnessed a dramatic public response to a government-sponsored “amnesty period” in which residents could turn in unregistered weapons without risking penalties. As “amnesty” suggests, many of the tens of thousands of weapons the government reclaimed were already outlawed, and Belgrade’s haul captured only a fraction of the weapons circulating in a nation that experienced a civil war in living memory. But the country’s effort to strengthen its firearms laws extends beyond confiscation:
Under recently introduced legislation, those who have not given up their unregistered weapons now face prison sentences of up to 15 years. Gun owners will face strict background checks, psychological evaluations and regular drug tests. Other measures have also been enacted, including a ban on new gun licenses, stricter controls on gun owners and shooting ranges, and tougher punishment for the illegal possession of weapons.
This NBC News report and a companion segment broadcast on NBC’s Today via reporter Richard Engel don’t dwell on new Serbian legal mechanisms designed to reduce the number of firearms in circulation. Rather, what has animated this country’s new champions in the West is its emotional response to two recent acts of mass gun violence and the lack of legal or constitutional impediments to implementing radical alterations to the social compact. As Engel beamed, the Serbian public committed themselves to “more than thoughts and prayers” when “outrage became action.”
“Tens of thousands demanded not just tighter gun controls but a reorientation of society away from violence,” Engel continued, “a reaction against armed rage.” In an interview with one Serbian, the NBC News reporter solicited advice for Americans who are distraught over their own country’s stubbornly inflexible constitutional rights. “I would say, safeguard your democracy if you still have it,” he replied.
This is a revealing exercise. The source of NBC News’s frustration is exposed in these reports as an American political culture that is resistant (by the Founders’ design) to fashion. If Serbia is anyone’s model, it’s not because it has a robust “democracy” to “safeguard.” It is because its democratic institutions are fledgling, and its dominant political culture is tribal and reactionary.
Few with a comprehensive understanding of Serbia’s social covenant would promote it as a model mature liberal democracies should emulate. Sure, Belgrade has recently adopted a less tolerant view toward firearms ownership, but that’s possible because Belgrade already has a less tolerant view toward many other essential liberties.
A European Parliament report published in 2022 found that journalists operating in Serbia are exposed to intimidation campaigns, harassment, and even physical attacks. With its historic ethnic ties to Russia, the country has also become a haven for the production and dissemination of disinformation — a condition facilitated by the “long-standing anti-EU/pro-Russian political rhetoric widely spread via government-controlled media as well as by government officials.”
Last year, the CIVICUS Monitor’s International Human Rights Watch List added Serbia to its ignominious register of states that are hostile to free association following the Serbian government’s unofficial but enforced restrictions on EuroPride celebrations. “This ban is a continuation of the practice of banning peaceful assemblies because of violent counter-assemblies,” said one civil liberties activist. The activist’s organization details a number of recent attacks on Serbia’s LGBT community to which the police have been conspicuously unresponsive.
The nonprofit global watchdog Freedom House has found Serbia’s commitment to political liberalism wanting, but its illiberalism is cleverly cloaked in fads that make it hard for Western progressives to recognize. In 2020, its parliament reduced the vote threshold a party must secure to win seats and imposed a “gender quota” on party lists. This superficially pluralist reform was, however, designed to weaken an opposition party boycott of mid-pandemic elections, which the government’s critics argued was illegitimate. Its campaign-finance laws are used to lock opposition forces out of government. The country’s legal restrictions on money laundering and its anti-terror statutes have been exploited to target nongovernmental organizations that promote human rights. As the NBC News report itself confessed, the private institutions that compose American civil society, such as private lobbying groups, are “nonexistent in Serbia and so cannot pressure politicians the way they can in the U.S.” If these reporters find that condition at all objectionable, it is not apparent from this dispatch.
It is not despite these arbitrary vestiges of Serbia’s Yugoslav past but because of them that NBC News has found something to celebrate in Belgrade’s recent reforms. It is because Serbia is less beholden to the inviolability of individual rights that it can impose and enforce legal restrictions on its citizens in response to trends that bubble up from the streets. That fact gets short shrift in NBC’s reporting because Serbia is a mere talisman. This selective overview of the Serbian legal landscape serves only to provide NBC News reporters with a platform from which they can rain moral opprobrium down upon their fellow Americans.
This report is valuable, though, as a window into a particular psychological predisposition. Americans who are beholden to the cult of action see the challenges associated with an abundance of liberty as a problem to be solved. But if the alternative to liberty is caprice, it’s a good problem to have.