Can Europe’s “Hidden Continent” Finally Break Free?

0:00David McWilliams: On the podcast today, we are in the Balkans. We are in Serbia. We're going to be talking about Russia, Serbia, the European Union, the future of the Balkans, and why this part of the world, Balkan Europe, is one of the great secrets of the continent, and if it could be unleashed, would be one of the most impressive economies, if they can turn things around after the last 40 or 50 years of bad leadership. So it's all from the Balkans, and I hope you enjoy it.

0:57I'm getting a$250 gift card as a thank you. That's bill.com slash proven. Terms and conditions apply. See offer page for details. There's one place for the newest drops in wellness and performance and the biggest sale of the year. It's the drop by GNC, curating the best of what's new, handpicked by the pros who know what works. And right now, get it all, buy one, get one 50 % off during the semi-annual Live Well sale. From crushing workouts to leveling up your nutrition and everything in between, get the best deals on the latest innovations. All the newness is all on sale right now during the Live Well Sale on The Drop by GNC.

1:39To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered by Acast.

1:51David McWilliams: How are you doing there? Welcome to the podcast. This one's going to be a strange one because it is coming to you from Serbia. Well, not actually coming from Serbia. I am just back a couple of hours ago from a visit to the capital of Serbia, Belgrade, where I did two things. First thing, I was launching the Serbian version of money, which is now Novats, which is money in Serbian and secondly I took in possibly the most extraordinary sporting event that I have ever witnessed which was not Ireland knocking lumps out of England last week but it was actually the Belgrade derby between Red Star Belgrade and Partisan Belgrade in the Maracana, the extraordinary stadium of Red Star Belgrade in Belgrade.

2:47An amazing John, that means of the three great, great derbies.

2:53David McWilliams: The Buenos Aires one, which is Baca against River, which I've been at. The Belgrade one, which I was at the other night. And the one to come is Fenerbahce against Galatasaray in Istanbul. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That would be great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So is the Serbian one, the Belgrade one, is that like akin to a Manchester derby? or a Liverpool derby? Or is it a bigger scale altogether? Much bigger scale. Premiership is brutal. John, let's slightly go off-piste here, but if it's£100 a ticket, right, to get to a game in the UK, which it is, you're just corporatisation. Well, that's very true, yeah.

3:38It used to be the family outing of the weekends. It's not anymore.

3:43David McWilliams: So to go to see Zvezda, which is Red Star, John, To go to see Zvezda, it costs you about five euros. Right. So it's a completely different vibe. So it's a huge stadium and it's jammers and there's flares and everything going on. There's ultras on either side. The noise is outrageous, surrounded by riot police. There's riot police everywhere. And the fans are unbelievably passionate. The decibels. You know the way you go to the Aviva Stadium and you can hear yourself thinking, Right? Yes. There's no atmosphere at all, right? You can hear the crunch of the prawn sandwiches. You can. Exactly. Well, there it is like, there is no booze served for about three miles into the stadium, right?

4:29David McWilliams: Oh, right. Okay. Because it's full on. And then the flares go off and it is just the most amazing spectacle. And of course, Zvezda, Red Star won 3-0. My mates are from Red Star. So we were in the Red Star end. Oh, right. Oh, good. Well, yes, definitely. I wouldn't have liked to be in the partisan end. Great game though. But if you are a football fan and you're listening to the podcast, no matter where you are listening, I would recommend if you can ever get down to Belgrade, do try and go to that because it is one of the great footballing occasions of global football. And of course, Red Star and Belgrade were Champions League winners in the early 90s.

5:11David McWilliams: They have produced an extraordinary conveyor belt of amazing Yugoslav talent, not particularly Serbian talent. Serbian football team, unlike the Croatian football team, the Croatian football team have been man for man the most successful football team in the world, national football team, on the basis of only 4 million people. The Serbs haven't been, but prior to that, the Yugoslav team, which were described as the Brazilians of Europe, were extraordinary. And the conveyor belt, or let's say the source of most of that talent, was Red Star Belgrade. They're called Red Star Belgrade, John, because it's the Red Star of communism.

5:49David McWilliams: I was going to say, is there a political kind of divide between Red Star and the partisans? Absolutely. So Red Star, so it's Severna Zvezda, which means Red Star in Serbian. And that comes from the Yugoslav army, who, of course, because they were a communist army, Tito's army had the Red Star on their little caps, you know? The partisan are, in effect, named after the partisans again, the Yugoslav army, the partisans who defeated the Nazis. In fact, interesting thing about Yugoslavia, Yugoslavia was the only self-liberated country in Europe in the Second World War. What do you mean? So everybody else was either liberated by Americans and are Russians or by Americans and British and are Russians.

6:39David McWilliams: Yugoslavs were the only people who got no real help from anyone. Little bit of air cover from the RAF, but that was about it. And absolutely no help from anyone. So the legacy of the Second World War is very, very deep still in Serbia. Most of Yugoslavia, particularly in Serbia, partisan Belgrade were essentially the football team of the cops, of the police force, Yugoslav police. So it's basically, you take your pick, it's coppers versus soldiers. Which one do you go for? So it's not a geographical divide of the city then? No, no, no, it's not at all. In fact, that's what I was asking to myself because I thought it would be a geographical divide.

7:21David McWilliams: I said, no, it's not at all. It's just a legacy probably passed down in the family, et cetera, et cetera. But it's a serious, serious rivalry. Serious rivalry. So, Mac, apart from the football and launching the book and drinking your head off by the looks of things. What else did you get up to down there? Because you spent a lot of time down there in the 90s, you know, in the height of that transition just after the Balkan War, when they were like emerging economies. So what's the economics of this pod? What's the economics of the area? And what's the economics of this podcast? I ended up working for a French bank called BNP.

8:05and my boss was a Serb. And the economics of all this is the economics of defaulted debts, John. So what happens to a country like Yugoslavia? What happens to the finance of a country like Yugoslavia when the country splits apart?

8:21David McWilliams: So just a little bit of potted history for people who weren't aware of the history of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia is set up after the First World War, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which was a combination of Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia kingdoms, a tripartite kingdom. It was occupied by the Nazis in 1941. It split apart the Croats, set up in Croatia pretty much a fascist regime. The Serbs, likewise under an occupation of the Germans, but gradually Tito, Marshal Tito, with his partisan movement, fought to liberate Yugoslavia from the Germans. And then after the Second World War, they set up a socialist state.

9:12David McWilliams: That socialist state was multi-ethnic, multi-religious. It had seven constituent republics. It was a very large country. It was a non-aligned country. In fact, Tito amazingly told Stalin where to go. Stalin had obviously occupied most of Eastern Europe. And even Stalin decided that the Russians couldn't have a go at the Yugoslavs because the partisans had been so successful. They were so violent against the Germans that even the Soviet Union said, okay, after the Second World War, you guys can go on your own. Then, very, very briefly, because we don't want to get into the whole history of why Yugoslavia collapsed.

9:53David McWilliams: But in effect, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Croat nationalism in particular, Slovene nationalism to a certain degree, both of these countries wanted to break away from Yugoslavia and create their own country, their own ethnically based country. And of course, what happened was the Yugoslavs under Milosevic, not only did Yugoslavs not allow the Croats to go their own way, but they attacked Croatia. And there was a serious first battle in Vukovar where the Yugoslav National Army were particularly brutal. But ironically, John, all of this kicked off in a place called Kosovo. And Kosovo is still a massive issue between Serbia and the European Union because the Serbs think Kosovo is part of Serbia proper, as it has always been.

10:51David McWilliams: the Russians likewise, and the Chinese likewise. They all refuse to recognize Kosovo. The European Union recognizes Kosovo. And for many, many Serbs, and this would be a conversation you'd have late at night, the Serbs believe that Kosovo is part of Serbia and that they cannot give it away to the Kosovan Albanians, even though the Kosovan Albanians are by far away the majority of the ethnic population there. Are they a separate kind of ethnic group, the Kosovans? Oh, yeah. They're Albanians. They're Muslims. They speak Albanian. The Serbs are Christian, Orthodox, and they speak, obviously, Serbian.

11:31David McWilliams: They write the Cyrillic. Serbia is very, very close to Russia. Russia has been Serbia's, in a way, protector for a couple of hundred years. And, of course, right now, Serbia is really the only pro-Russian European country in the sense that Serbia has not imposed sanctions. It's the only place in Europe you can fly directly to Moscow. And interestingly, since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, 200 ,000 young Russians have dodged the draft by moving to Serbia. And they are, in the main, very wealthy, very cosmopolitan. They're coming largely from St. Petersburg. They have increased dramatically rents in Serbia.

12:17David McWilliams: they've increased dramatically. As my Serb friends say, they said, we never saw a cocktail bar in this town before those fools arrived. Now they're all drinking Negronis and all that sort of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Eating caviar and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because the Serb likes his red wine. Anyway, the point is, I went down there years ago because when Yugoslavia split apart, the debts of Yugoslavia, which were owned by various different institutions got defaulted on. And Croatia and Slovenia wanted to get back into financial markets. They wanted to be able to go back in and borrow money. So in order to do that, they had to sort out the existing debts.

13:03David McWilliams: And they had to do deals with what was called the London Club and the Paris Club and all that sort of stuff. And I was the economist on the team. So I went down to Serbia, to Croatia, to basically write the reports on how the economy was doing, how the politics was doing. So it was great. So you were exposed to the very, very... What a fascinating time to be there. Yeah, it was brilliant. It was just after the Dayton Accord, which was 1995. So that was the peace between Croatia and Serbia, which was largely a peace that Serbia lost. Of course, the background noise was the genocide in Bosnia, which went on from 1992 to 1995.

13:42David McWilliams: So I ended up in Croatia in 1996, 1997, and then in Serbia in 1997, because Serbia was then, and Belgrade was then, very much the financial capital of the former Yugoslavia, even though they were all splitting apart. And what was the state of the economy then? And what is the state of the economy now? Like, how have they progressed and developed? I would say that no country has made more disastrous decisions when it comes to the economy than Serbia has over the last 40 years. Wow. Why is that? Because in effect, John, you have two really contrasting forces in global economics. You have sovereignty, which is what people want in terms of political sovereignty.

14:36David McWilliams: And then you have globalization. And these are always coming up against each other. And so for most countries, it's a sort of a choice. you realize, well, we have to give away a little bit of sovereignty in order to be part of the global economy. And of course, the third aspect of that is if we don't, money will flow out of the country. So you can either have open markets or nationalism, but you really can't have both, right? This is a sort of an observation I've kind of made along the way. And what the Serbs did, because they became so nationalistic, and because they declared war on their neighbors.

15:16David McWilliams: So Tito died in 1980, and Yugoslavia started to pull apart then, right? They had a terrible situation of hyperinflation through the 80s. So already what you're doing is you're destroying the middle class's savings and the middle class's stake in society. They actually had the highest hyperinflation in the world, worse than the Weimar Republic in 1991 in Serbia, right? So all the middle class's savings are destroyed. And as I've always said, you know, when you mess with the money, you really... Sorry, what was the main cause of this inflation? The early 1990s hyperinflation was triggered by massive spending on the part of the Milosevic government to finance the war that they were kicking off in Croatia and Bosnia.

16:01David McWilliams: So they just printed money to pay the soldiers. And ultimately, what you got was a, what they call an inflationary spiral, where the dinar currency continued to fall. As it fell, the price of imports got higher. That made inflation higher. That made the dinar fall more. That made the rate of inflation higher. So they got into a hyperinflationary spiral in Serbia, which was associated with the government, the Milosevic government, spending money to pay troops and to keep the JNA, the Yugoslav National Army, ticking over in Croatia and in Bosnia. They then tried to stabilize that in the 90s. But of course, because they were instrumental in the genocide, I mean, the Serbs are no angels in this.

16:51David McWilliams: They were sanctioned by the West. So they're certainly isolated. They have a worthless currency. They can't trade. And of course, if you look at the geography of Serbia, it's right in the middle of Europe. It's right in the middle of the Balkans. So if you can't trade with anybody, you're isolated. You don't get any technology. You don't get any transfer of cash. You don't get any FDI. You're getting hyperinflation. In effect, what you've done is you've actually created the environment for destroying the economy, which is exactly what they did. And they didn't get any kind of support, given that they were so Russia-facing.

17:29I know Russia was going through its own... You see, Russia was going through its own crisis. So the Putin-Russia of now, you know,

17:38David McWilliams: which stabilized because oil prices stabilized in the late 1990s and became a net exporter of capital, its own capital, actually. That was a far, far, far cry from the Russia of Yeltsin's era. But the Yugoslavs and the Serbs and the Russians were in effect caught in a sort of a hyperinflationary brace, both of them. So the Serbs were completely isolated. But they voted for that, right? And there is a kind of a, there is a cussedness. And then, of course, in 1998, the Serbian army turned around and went into Kosovo to try and eradicate the KLA, the Kosovan Liberation Army. And there was a little civil war there.

18:24David McWilliams: So the Americans responded to Serbian aggression in Kosovo, which they had also seen Serbian aggression in Bosnia. and they feared that what had happened in Sarajevo was going to happen in Pristina. And so the NATO bombers decided to bomb Serbia for 56 nights in a row. And that is very much seared into the mentality of Serbs now. You're talking about before the bombing and after the bombing. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. NATO, terrorist. NATO, terrorist. All that, yeah. Even yesterday, even before the game, we were talking to friends of ours who were young, friends of Lucy's, right? So in their 20s, they're all madly anti-American, madly anti-European, which is really quite interesting, and madly anti-NATO.

19:15I was going to ask you that because you were saying about Serbia being the only Russia-supporting country, but, you know, the whole, like, we're not going to get into it now, but the whole thing with Hungary and Slovakia vetoing the EU 90 billion package for Ukraine and stuff. But what you're saying is that that makes so much more sense. I was wondering, why are they so Russia-facing, all these guys? It's interesting. And it's interesting to the podcast this week, given that it's now the fourth anniversary into the fifth year of the war in Ukraine. So the Serbs have always been pro-Russian. and the reasons for this are very, very deep and very historic.

20:01So Serbia is an Orthodox, a Christian Orthodox country

20:04David McWilliams: and Russia sees itself as the sort of the, as the mothership of Christian Orthodoxism. In fact, the Russians regard themselves as the real Rome. They call Moscow the real Rome. They regard the schism in the Catholic Church, which I think was in the 7th or 18th century, 7th or 18th century. Nicene Creed. Do you remember that, John? We learned it in school, right? I do. I do remember doing that. So they regard the schism in the Christian church as a watershed moment. And they are the real inheritors of Constantinople, number one. And Constantinople was where the Roman Empire and the Christian Empire remained true to its Christian core.

20:52and that Christian core is Orthodox. And in that, they share the same religion as the Greeks, the Bulgarians, the Serbs, the Romanians, and of course, the Russians, and a lot of Ukrainians too. So what you have is, first of all, you have the religious stroke cultural proximity to Russia. And the second part is the geostrategic proximity to Russia. So Russia has always had two major enemies in the world. It is the Turks, the Ottomans, and the German stroke Austrians. These have been its two major enemies over the last 300 years. Of course, the Serbs also have had two major enemies. The Ottoman Turks, who occupied the Serbs for many, many centuries, number one.

21:43David McWilliams: and of course the Austrians who were the invaders that Gavriello Princip had a go at when he killed Franz Ferdinand. And so it happens that the Venn diagram of my enemy's enemy is my friend sort of thing overlaps profoundly in Serbia with the Russians. So the Russians have always acted as the Serb protectors, or at least they've decided, they've indicated that they would always come on bored with the Serbs. So as a result of that, you have a long-standing friendship between Serbia and Russia. Yeah. And it is very, very deep. And it is a combination of politics and history and culture and language, of course.

22:26David McWilliams: I mean, they write Cyrillic. They write in the Cyrillic alphabet. Right. But it's interesting, you sent a few pictures over the weekend. One of the mad football match with all the flares, which I'm sure Dundalk and John would have something to say about that. But you also said the picture of a street name dedicated to Garviela Pritchett. Yeah, I mean... It's bonkers. I just think that it's the only country in the world where the guy who started the First World War will actually have a street name named after him. You're not going to see that in Vienna. I can tell you that for something. But again, what it does is it gives you a good idea that, you know, Europe is locked into a tripartite battle about the way in which we see the economy, the way we see society, the way we see the world.

23:13You have the Atlanticist battle, which is basically Britain with America. I put Ireland firmly into that group too,

23:22David McWilliams: which is in effect has always looked to the United States as the protector for Western Europe. And part of the Atlanticist worldview is to always keep the Russians and the Germans away from each other because what the Atlanticists, that's Washington and London, I've always wanted to avoid in Europe is an alliance between Russia and Germany. Because A, Russia has no industry to speak of and lots of resources, and Germany has no resources and lots of industry. Yeah, but how likely is an alliance in this context, in this day and age? unlikely but the point is that the atlanticists have always tried to drive a wedge between the germans and the russians because that's a big fear then you have what i would call the continentals which was in effect the french allied with the russians against the germans which was basically the alliances of all the 19th century and into the first world war and the second world war So you have basically the Axis powers of Austria and Germany, but they're surrounded by Russia and France and Britain.

24:34So that's the Brits playing both games. And then, of course, you have what I call the Orthodox world, this sort of the Balkan world, where three big, big cultures clash, which is the Orthodox culture, the Slav culture in effect, going all the way back to ethnicity, the German culture and the Latin culture, which is the north of Italy. And there, of course, you have, again, another big fault line. And all these cultural, historical, economic, political, geostrategic worldviews mean that when you sit in somewhere like Belgrade, you get a very, very different feel for who's right, who's wrong. So for example, the anti-NATO feeling is substantiated by the fact that the Americans have put the largest NATO base in Kosovo in Europe, which is, again, the Serbs feel is surrounding them.

25:37Yeah, yeah.

25:38David McWilliams: And in 1999, NATO attacked the Serbs. The Serbs think they are innocent, but clearly the attack was in retaliation for them in Kosovo. But what I'm saying is, you're having a glass of wine and suddenly, John, you're exposed to a whole host of different views and different opinions and different logical positions. So you ask them about Ukraine and they say, well, you know, Russia has the right to occupy Crimea and Donbass. They say that straight away because these are historically, ethnically Russian areas. And Ukraine is trying to drag what they believe is a orthodox country into the European Union's orbit.

26:28Now, that sounds like Putin speak when you're listening to them. But it's interesting. These are not stupid people. They're not uneducated people. They are not, I don't think they're brainwashed. I think they're a function of their own history. And I think that's what makes those little weekends to travel over to those places so illuminating. because on a week like today, or in a week like this, where we're getting, I think rightly so, a memorial to a stupid war by a stupid man, which seems to be leading to nothing but chaos and death and destruction, and there seems to be no way out of it. Yeah.

27:11Then you listen to those Serbs, and again, those Serbs are very close to the Greeks who think the same way. The Bulgarians think the same way. And you've got a whole different worldview, which is the Southern Slav or the Orthodox worldview, which really sees Moscow as a protector in a world driven by American interests, which they don't share. And it's kind of fascinating. Yeah, that is fascinating. But can I just ask you then that in that worldview, if, for instance, Zelensky gave up the Donbass and, well, the Crimea is gone, does it stop there in their view? Or do they believe that all of Ukraine should be part of this orthodox world?

28:00So I think it's quite interesting. What I find interesting about Serbian worldview is the Serbs believe that they have been badly treated by the rest of Europe. They believe that their history, they were always the Christian bulwark nation against the Ottoman Turks, against the Muslims coming up from Turkey. And they believe that they have uniquely, uniquely of all European nations, suffered the most in trying to keep the Turks out. And in effect, the Serbs were the garrison of Europe. Yeah. And they think that they have been very, very badly treated, that nobody really respects that. And one of the battles was in the 13th century, the Battle of the Field of the Black Crows, John.

28:51David McWilliams: There you go, right? Just so you know it, okay? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which was in Kosovo, and that is the beating heart of Serb civilization and Orthodox Christianity in Europe. Now, the problem is, as Irish people know, a country can make a choice. You can consistently look backwards and hostage yourself to events over which you have no control, which happened years ago. And we have that in Irish nationalism. If it wasn't for the burning of Cork, you know, all that sort of stuff, right? Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, the Cromwell and stuff, you know, our partition or whatever. We can't get away from it.

29:28You can look backwards or you can look forwards or you can do a combination of both. And I think what is now beginning to happen from what I gather in Serbia, is that the younger people are want to look forward. Now, how do we know this? We know this is because there has been the single largest protests in Europe against the government for the last 16 months in Serbia. The Serbian students have been going out on strike, triggered by a collapse of a train station in Novi Sad, but that was

30:03David McWilliams: indicative of the corruption of the Vucic government. Now, it seems that those protests have dissipated somewhat, but it's very, very clear that there's a struggle for the heart and soul of this country. And of course, the reason that's important is that Serbia is still the hub of the Balkans. Even after all the death of Yugoslavia and all the nonsense they've been through and all the ridiculous economic policies they've had and the fact that now the Vucic government is in effect a kleptocracy. It's like a sort of, if you talk to them, they say it's mimicking Russia in that way. That type of way.

30:40But despite all this, the Serbian young people, the students are still on the street trying to agitate for change because they know that they can't spend their lives looking backwards at what happened in the 15th century, in the 19th century, etc etc so it's got this very strange sort of tug of war between the kids looking for the future and the older people looking to the past and you can really feel that there yeah and and the students the protesting students they're looking for a more democratic society but do they have somebody there in the in the wings ah you see this is just a very good question they have nobody right?

31:22So they had the most charismatic non-nationalist leader that Serbs have had for years was a guy called Zoran Dendic and he was murdered. Prime Minister, they murdered him, right? Assassinated, right? They haven't had somebody like that for a long time and they've been characterized by poor leadership. So Vucic, the present leader, has been in there since 2012. now he's not stupid he's clever he is very nationalistic or at least comes from that world

31:58David McWilliams: his best mate is victor orban they get on very very well there you go it's interesting even though he's got all this orthodox stuff he's quite obsessed by weber by max weber the protestant work ethic so i think in effect he does want to turn serbia into little germany that's my feeling But the point is, he's been around for a long time. And what he has done is he's put his own fellows into the army, the police, the universities, the civil service. So he has done what they call state capture. The state itself has been captured by this political movement. And that is the fault line between the students who want to be Europeans, who want to be able to travel, who want to be able to live in the world.

32:43And of course, what you'll find is that in Serbia, there's two state televisions that the older people watch, which are censored. But all the kids are on YouTube and they're on Instagram and they see everything. So what you have is this massive generational battle between the older people and the younger people. At the moment, the older people are winning because they have the state mechanism, the police force behind them and all that sort of stuff.

33:09David McWilliams: But, you know, in the long term, what Serbia probably wants is an associated membership with the European Union, which is what they're being offered now, which is free trade, free movement of people, but they won't have voting rights within the European Union. And that, I think, is as good as they're going to get because they don't want the European Union to recognize Kosovo. So it's all these sort of negotiations are going on at the time. But again, it's fascinating stuff. So then with the rising kind of protests in the last while, like what is the future of Serbia? And not just as Serbia as a nation, but Serbia within the greater context of Europe.

33:51But hang on, before you answer that, let's do a bit of this.

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35:26So, Mike, you're in Serbia giving us a rundown of the history of Serbia, the economy of Serbia, where it has been, but where is it going? What is the future of Serbia within the greater context of Europe? Well, I think there's one optimistic note I'd like to end with, which is that, as you know, I go to Croatia a lot. And I have spent a lot of time in the Balkans.

35:51David McWilliams: And I like the Balkans. I like the people. They like you. They like me. They're incredibly generous. They're gregarious people. They're very hospitable. They're funny. there is a love of life in the Balkans that you don't get in any other part of Europe. I really believe this. There's a spirit. There's a sense of joy. There are highly emotionally charged people in the sense that they can love you and hate you in equal measure at the same time over the same glass of wine. They are voluminous. It's confusing. They're late night people. They love singing. They love dancing. I mean, the Balkans is a really interesting place.

36:32David McWilliams: And it really is, I know it's a cliche, but it is a crossroads. I have lots of Croat mates. I have lots of Serb mates. I have lots of Jewish mates from down there. I have Muslim mates. All these different ethnicities who have lived amongst themselves really in the melting pot of Europe. If you think about how Europeans walked out of Anatolia many, many years ago, they all came, all Europeans came through the Balkans. That's how we walked up front, if you think about it. So they are, in effect, the people from the Balkans are such a good representative of what it is to be a European. They're linguistically dexterous, they're intellectual, they love sport, they love fun, the weather is great, the food is great.

37:23So this is a fantastic part of the world. and its last 40 years has been so unbelievably tragic. So the breakup of Yugoslavia, the ethnic genocide in Bosnia,

37:39David McWilliams: the fact that Croatia hasn't really ever delivered on its promise as an independent nation that seems to be going sideways, the fact that Serbia has never recovered from the end of Yugoslavia, although it's quite a big country, it's seven or maybe six, six and a half million. And Belgrade is a big metropolis of maybe two million. It really is a country with kind of lost direction. It's been played by Russia. It's been played by the European Union. It's also been played by China. So it is a sort of a tragic, tragic story. But there's one thing that's happened this year, which I think has been, for me anyway, a very interesting and positive cultural straw in the wind.

38:20David McWilliams: And it's called Zvadba. Okay. Zvadhbadan means wedding in Serbo-Croat, Croatian, Serbian, Baltic, whatever language you choose, right? And it is a Croatian-produced rom-com. It's like my big fat Greek wedding. Do you remember that one? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Except it's a wedding between... Yeah, and it's really interesting. It's a wedding between a Croatian and a Serbian. Right. Now, it has broken all box offices in former Yugoslavia. 1.5 million Serbs have gone to see it. 1 million Croats have gone to see it. Now, to give you a sense of the population, there are only 4 million Croats. There's only 6 million Serbs.

39:03David McWilliams: So, you know, a quarter of the people have gone to see it. It has broken all records. 700 ,000 Bosnians have gone to see it, right? And what it is, it reinforces, again, similarities between the peoples, right? Right? So typically in Croatian and Serbian history, the Serbs are the warriors and the Croats are the intellectuals. Right? This flips it on its head. So the Serb family are the kind of intellectuals and the Croats are the kind of rough and ready people. And basically what it has done a little bit sometimes, if we could even go there with respect to Ireland and Northern Ireland or whatever, our similarities are so much more than our differences.

39:46You know? Yeah. When big Stu McCluskey breaks through on the road. Does anybody care what his background is? Do you see what I mean? It's the same thing that I would see optimistically is that in all the nationalism and in all the radicalism and in all the sectarianism down there, there is a ray of hope which is that a movie like this reinforces to everyone in the former Yugoslavia that they are really similar. But they are bonded by language. They are bonded by culture. They are bonded by geography more than anything else. They are bonded by history. And, you know, if they could reduce in some way those barriers, those 1990s nationalist barriers

40:35David McWilliams: that went up in the 1990s as a result of the war, and that's what happens when countries go to war. But if they could get over that, if the new generation could get over that, It would seem to me that the future economically of this part of Europe, which has never really since the 19th century fired on all cylinders when it comes to finance and economics, but that they have a chance. But that chance is that they come together. And, you know, sometimes culture, as I've always said in the podcast, John, culture is ahead of economics and politics. Yes. And of course, if, as you say, they were firing on all cylinders and reaching their full potential, they'd be an enormous addition and benefit to Europe.

41:22Completely, completely. I mean, these are the Balkan people are the cradle of European civilization. And they have just in the last 50 years missed out on everything. And they've been badly run, badly managed, badly led. But that doesn't mean that that's going to happen indefinitely.

41:42David McWilliams: So I would say, John, we will leave it here. We will all go to see Zvadba, the wedding, a rom-com involving Croats and Serbs. It has been a fascinating weekend to be down there. And I hope, dear listeners, you enjoy this little sideway into a tributary of Europe that many people have forgotten exists. But believe me, if you get the chance, This is possibly the most wonderful part of our most wonderful content. We'll talk to you next week.

42:58Thank you.

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