President: Without EU Serbia can sink into nationalism

Source: Tanjug

FRANKFURT, BELGRADE -- Serbian President Boris Tadić has warned that a delay and new conditions in the EU integration process increase the danger of new instability.

Boris Tadić (Tanjug, file)

He added that it also represented a threat that Serbia, and the Western Balkans alongside it, could once again sink into the darkness of nationalism and intolerance.
In a piece for Frankfurt-based daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Tadić pointed out that EU membership was Serbia's strategic goal, just as Serbia's European orientation should be of strategic importance to the EU.

The Serbian president reminded that the country had fulfilled all earlier conditions in the EU accession process, which involved making some unpopular and difficult decisions, taking on great political responsibility and, in some cases, even a great personal risk.

“The question arises why Serbia is being pushed to the sidelines of contemporary historical processes and why the enormous political efforts, undertaken in order to make a clean break with the policies which led to the wars in the former Yugoslavia, are in advance condemned to failure and defeat? Will this not be too big a trial for the Serbian society and the fledgling Serbian democracy," he wondered in the text entitled “Serbia at a European Crossroads”.

“If Serbia is kept outside the EU, this will long be seen as evidence that the special system of values used to define Europe as a community is just an illusion of the eternal politics of the big and the small,” Tadić warned.

“Today more than ever, it is obvious that Serbia's European integration process depends not only on the readiness and ability to complete the social and economic reforms under way in the country, but also on to what extent the EU is ready to complete, in the foreseeable future, its mission of establishing a zone of peace, prosperity and stability on the whole European continent,” the president explained.

“Regardless of when Serbia and Europe will be ready for one another, Serbia will keep up the pace of social, political and economic reforms,” he pointed out.

Tadić recalled that the European Commission also positively assessed Serbia's reform efforts and results.