Responsiveness, Strategy and Health as Diplomacy: The Unlikely Case of Serbia

The virus had caught the world unawares. The term “the new normal” already became part of our everyday vocabulary. Its meaning changes and morphs, arguably it has already become a lot less prominent at the time of writing, some 20 months since the recorded emergence of COVID-19. Regardless, the sense of new norms and normative behaviours has overwhelmed the world. It remains highly questionable whether the world will ever be truly comparable with the pre-2020 standards preceding the Event. Not that the world has not seen its fair share of plagues over the centuries. The latest such brutal infection that swept the globe killed more people than the Great War a century ago. What has changed since is that, once gladly built then mainly disappeared, the notion of a welfare state and its ethics mobilised governments and many national and supranational stakeholders into action. Action which despite still being largely uncoordinated remains high on the agenda of international affairs. And although the world’s response to the covid pandemic has reinforced some global divides of wealth, development, regulation; equality, ethical distribution of medicine, intellectual property of its products; access to treatment; labour and skills needed etc—it also seems to have publicly enhanced the need for cooperation required for a meaningful and effective action against disease. Serving as evidence that money is neither necessarily the prerequisite nor the answer, is the case of Serbia. Arguably, a state with very limited resources or influence on the world stage, in between powerful trading blocks and a customary portrayal in western press which seems less than flattering decades after the troubles, this small south European country responded rather better than many in the world’s far wealthiest countries per capita. The teething problems with the pandemic response seem eerily commonplace: denial, then panic, blunt instruments and eventual realisation that a subtle strategy is the best tool against the invisible enemy. Not to underestimate the effects of covid on all levels of supply chains, on labour disruption, an increased sense of international distrust and blame-apportioning, it appears that often individual actors left to their own devices used such predicament as an opportunity. What sets Serbia apart is (1) a brutally effective response in mid-March 2020 which created a hermetic curfew, especially on the over-65s, lasting for over 7 weeks; (2) the self-imposed national and international lockdown, then more limiting than the coinciding, widely reported one in Italy; (3) empirical data showing the causal impact of sudden loosening of restrictions over summer, leading to (4) a carefully coordinated strategy that included largely well-managed, less onerous partial restrictions and (5) an unprecedented effort aimed at mass-vaccination both of its own citizens and foreigners. The latter has a set of diplomatic characteristics: citizens of the region with even the loosest connection to Serbia felt invited to get vaccinated together with its own, by any number of jabs obtained by the country’s leadership from any and all brand actors, manufacturers and states willing to oblige. Moreover, even though outside of any powerful trading blocs—or perhaps because of it—Serbia was able to rapidly obtain access to almost all the vaccines unburdened by ideological divides and state/corporate self-interests of global leaders. Further, it obtained the patent rights to produce first one, then two of the vaccines at its own self-managed immunological institutes. Immunological independence is becoming a new currency across levels of practice and discourse alike. Finally, despite its much diminished media image and a painfully transitioned economy, Serbia has long been donating some of its stock of vaccines to countries and states across the world, starting from its immediate neighbours and reaching farther afield than many, far wealthier ones. The virus seems unique and the grim pandemic aftermath feels far from over. For a long time it flared up time and again, even where it was considered defeated; in places perceived as role models of success. There is no guarantee that horrific scenes of covid hospitals set up in sports venues will not return in some other guise and by some other agent. The image of the hazmat suit so darkly reminiscent of pictures of the plague immortalised in art and literature is inspiring a nightmarish narrative in many places. Finally, any astute social scientist will argue against judging of contemporary events without due caution. The world’s organisations far surpassing in power any single state or individual urge caution and cooperation. This is just a snippet from the beginning of a new narrative of the care for the world’s health. Never seemingly more divided, it seems united in its goal towards healing.