Politicians and Royals Stay True To EU Ambitions While Public Support Wanes
Serbia’s leaders remain steadfast in their ambitions to join the expanding ranks of the Europe Union, while public support for EU membership has fallen to a nine-year low.
Europe represents the key to a brighter future for Serbia, attracting foreign investment, improving living standards and presenting fresh opportunities for young people. That is according the Crown Prince Alexander, who stands alongside president Boris Tadic in his public support for Serbia’s advance down the road to the EU.
However, a government-commissioned report released this week by the Office for EU Integration shows that their views buck the trend on the streets of Serbia, where support for EU membership has crashed to just 53%.
“I think our role is to have reconciliation and to move ahead towards Europe, which is so important,’ Crown Price Alexander told W!LD RooSTeR in a forthright interview at Belgrade’s Royal Palace. “We want to have an understanding of what’s going on in Brussels, to take part in all the conferences. And to do so as an equal partner, that is absolutely vital. If we don’t do that, we could stand to be totally isolated.
“We cannot be an island isolated in the middle of the Balkans. We belong in Europe. All the neighbouring countries are doing the same thing. We have to have a voice in Europe – we don’t want to be dictated to anymore. To get fair treatment, one has to be a member of these entities. That is so important. If you’re not at the table, you’ll always be pushed away. We need our place at that table.
“The European Union can be a great forum for us to talk about things and make exchanges, and for Belgrade to be a great meeting point. It can put us back on the map. We’ve come back a bit but we need to come back even more.”
The Crown Prince stands with Tadic on being openly pro-EU, seeing the opportunities for Serbia presented by membership of international organisations. He agues that this does not mean that other relationships need to suffer – as fear-mongers often like to foretell – but should broaden Serbia’s influence.
“This doesn’t mean that we forget about our other relationships,’ he said. “We need a close relationship with Russia and other countries. We have a relationship with the Unaligned Nations and we are hosting a conference in September, here. It’s important that we keep these links up. We can do so much in partnership and friendship with many countries.”
According to the June poll of one thousand adults, undertaken by Serbia’s Office for EU Integration (European Orientation of Serbian Citizens: Trends), public favour has fallen from a 72% peak in 2003.
Commentators have reasonably suggested that this drop is due in part to the inflated impressions of EU membership, previously spread by Serbia’s politicians. They excited public opinion by encouraging them to equate membership with the benefits of an apparently bottomless purse for grants and handouts. When they saw that this was not necessarily the case, public support waned to today’s more sober figure.
Recent chaos in Greece and financial bail-outs in other member states have also tarnished the public opinion of the EU, leading the Serbian public to realise that, despite some politicians’ claims of grants and jobs, the path to Europe is not a yellow brick road to Oz.
Elsewhere in the report, support remains strong for reforms to bring Serbia up to scratch for EU membership. Unsurprisingly, 85% of those polled back moves that will deliver better living standards.
President Boris Tadic rose to power in the 2008 elections, largely propelled off the back of signing an EU Stabilisation and Association Agreement. Since then, he has taken Serbia down the road to Brussels, most recently by completing the EU questionnaire in January.
If all goes to plan, Serbia should become a candidate late in 2011. As that date approaches, the realities of EU membership become clearer and negative forces in the country arm themselves to raise the downsides of candidacy. Viewed in that light, perhaps their drop in support is not so surprising.
With EU membership on the horizon and foreign investors seeing fresh appeal in Serbia, the Crown Prince believes the next ten years holds great promise.
“I think Serbia will move ahead in a big way as its economic revival takes place,’ he said. “Of course there are some problems within the European Union, namely Greece, which have to be sorted out but we’re on the right course. There is so much to be done. We cannot spend hours arguing about politics, ignoring what’s going on elsewhere.
“We have to get more organised: move towards Europe, work together with our partners, bring investors here. Even with the difficult times now, there are some interesting things happening with investors: some Japanese are coming, some Chinese.
“My wife and I try to do our role in promoting the country and visiting entities abroad. We try to draw people here. We promote it to investors at conferences, as well as extraordinary things like the Prayer Breakfast in Washington, which takes place every February. We are invited there every year and it’s a place where we meet all the American politicians, get to know them, and hope that they will agree to come over here and see that we are alive and kicking. That we are perfectly normal, that we have two arms and two legs, not ten legs and ten arms.”
While Asia has woken up to the potential of Serbia and the US is in his sights, the Crown Prince is calling on the United Kingdom to improve its efforts to encourage British businesses to look again at Serbia.
“We hope that the United Kingdom will do much more to attract investment here,’ he said. “It could have been much better but we did not maybe provide the right image, the right security, one might say: is one Pound going to be a secure Pound being invested in this region?
“Now it is better and we would like to see far more British involvement, including British banking, which we find very important. There is a lot to be learned in how financial institutions operate, the stock exchange and all that. We have a stock exchange but we would like a much better, closer relationship. We make some very fine products, also. Our costs are not high so we can be profitable.”
One thing vital for Serbia to realise the full potential of its future is to life the veil on its own history, according to the Crown Prince. He believes it is time for Serbia to see the truth buried beneath the dust of age-old myths.
“It is getting better because during the dictatorship years, history was definitely cleansed,’ said the Crown Prince. “Stories were even pushed out that my family left with trainloads of gold – which would have been rather nice, I would have survived a bit better – which was, of course, not the case.
“Now we’re getting our proper history. Of course it was always known that the founder of the Karadjordjevic dynasty was a hero and the name was well known, but when it came to the details of the kings thereafter, there were all sorts of idiotic stories.
“That was a tragedy of the civil war during the Second World War, where all sides did not behave quite well, unfortunately. But the stories are now going away. The media has helped. We still have some way to go with the media but it is getting much better.
“It is only ten years in since we had our revolution and we’ve done a lot in those years. But we’re new at politics in a multi-party system and that has to settle down. Look at the coalition in the United Kingdom, how difficult things are, so you can imagine here with several partners how difficult it is. But there are a lot of positives that have happened. Some sad things, tragically, have happened, like the assassination of Prime Minister Djindjic.”
For many years, the extreme actions of Serbia’s ultra nationalist elements have been a bitter thorn in the side of the country’s international image. These movements have, it is argued, hijacked the flag and twisted the myths of Serbia’s chequered history to suit their own ends. Crown Prince Alexander believes that regaining national pride from the ultra nationalists is one key to Serbia’s renaissance.
“We have a mixed culture in Serbia. We have monasteries which are really worth visiting, we have an Islamic community, we have a roman catholic community, and we have a small jewish community. We are a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state – and it will remain like that.
“There is no room for any ultra nationalists: ultra left or ultra right,’ he said. “There is no room in any country, certainly not in Europe, the United States or Canada, or any of the advanced industrial World. They will not be tolerated. They will be searched out. We will not tolerate any terrorist acts of that kind. Our Minister of the Interior is doing pretty well in that, in cooperation with other entities in the Europe Union and the United States. We believe in parties that believe in democratic principles and that is our future. So we say no to extremism.”
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