Rise and Fall of DOS

The period from 2000 to 2003 in Serbia was marked by great hopes and betrayed expectations. People expected that changes after Milosevic and a better life would come almost over night. But the reality was different.

These days, during the spring of 2010 as I am finishing this book about the recent history of Serbia, this country looks different from the perspective of 2000 but, unfortunately not as we expected it to look ten years ago. We expected that the Serbian economy would recover rather quickly, that large foreign investment would arrive, that unemployment would drop, that corruption and crime would diminish and that Serbia would join the EU and other Euro-Atlantic integrations. Obviously problems were much harder and deeper then we could even imagine ten years ago. It is a big question whether any different leaders would have been able to do better than the actors described in this book. Serbia with its history, problems with Kosovo and Metohija and its own tradition was the framework in which the main actors acted as best as they could. Many of us were expected that the citizens of Serbia would be able to overcome the obstacles from the past. This simply did not happen.