By Dejan Azeski- IFIMES
For those of us who do not remember Yugoslavia from our very birth, we are told about membership in the European Union as the only path to our brighter future. We are almost forced to experience that sublime creation like the Fairy Cities in popular Western fairy tales. It is as if we are endlessly waiting for the fairies to fly in and pollinate us with the dust of eternal spring and prosperity.
But in those same fairy tales, as a rule, wherever there are fairies, there are also disguised orcs who live somewhere underground, like insects that feed on the remains of the rest of the cultural world. Many of my generation were sincere fans of masterful film achievements like Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings until at one point we collectively realized that in the perspective of the founding nations of the European family: orcs, goblins, trolls and all other disgusting creatures, it is actually us who have been waiting for 35 years (or exactly since the year I was born) under the medieval walls of the European Union.
This endless wait would not be so terrible if there were a clear and principled criterion for the path that needs to be taken to the “civilizational Olympus”. In general, we are all aware that in many areas we really do not deserve to be on the same level as Germany, the Netherlands, Liechtenstein, Monaco and many other smaller and larger countries of our continent. But when the benefits of that same European Union have been used for decades by our immediate neighbors Bulgaria or Romania, and when there is a big discussion about the admission of Moldova, which probably will not be at the level we are at now in a thousand years, then the last atoms of our dignity really begin to boil.
Overflowing the cup of patience
The cup of our patience is also overflowing with official statements by high-ranking officials of the Union, according to which: they must redirect Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia and similar countries to the fast lane – because if they had waited to join us, maybe it would never have happened. As if we are to blame for the fact that the countries of the Union literally do not know which path to take in both foreign and domestic policy, so in all that chaos they endlessly put our membership aside.
That small initiative from Hungary, from whose presidency of the Union we honestly expected much more, was also frankly disappointing for us. However, the country with which Macedonia and Serbia have the closest relations has failed to do anything significant to move the processes forward.
It is very fortunate that we will certainly not be disappointed by the Polish presidency, because according to its current policy, we cannot expect anything special from that country. There, the entire focus is clearly placed on spreading hostility and hatred towards Russia as their real or imagined enemy, which tells us with certainty in advance that all the energy in the next ten months will be directed in that direction and for us from the Western Balkans, nothing will be done again.
As for the next chairman of the union, whoever he is, we probably will not even get to see whether he will do anything more or not, because each country from the Western Balkans will go its own way. Like Macedonia, for example, with its strategic partnership with Great Britain, which literally came out of nowhere like a bolt of lightning.
But this is not some new and unprecedented scenario for us former Yugoslavs. For historians, interesting for analysis are the television footage from the small Slovenian border town of Ilirska Bistrica, where in 1991 literally the entire population came out to block the colonies of the former Yugoslav People’s Army that were going as reinforcements to secure the customs posts towards Italy and Austria. It really sounds impossible that in 1989 Slovenia was so loyal to brotherhood and unity, and that same people just a year later were 100% ready to take to the streets against that same Yugoslavia. This can only be explained by one logic: that the disappointment with the then common state began to accumulate much, much earlier. Probably the headquarters in Belgrade had been making wrong moves for decades and managed to turn the people in Slovenia and Croatia against themselves to the point that they stopped feeling the common state as their own.
This is exactly what Brussels is doing to us, and in an even more brutal form, with all these endless delays in membership and negotiations and with open insults. The third and most difficult act of this endless drama is the very unclear future of the union, for which we do not see a clear direction in which it is going. If we analyze the entire history, federal and confederal forms of alliances have never lasted more than half a century on average. The European Union, as the successor to the Economic Community for Coal and Steel, has indeed managed to surpass that magic number, but in the years when it should have been the strongest, it lost as much as 35 years without managing to Europeanize the Balkans at least a little and expanded here at least part of its positions. These practices undoubtedly exist.
Hence, there is a rightful fear among progressive intellectuals in these regions that entire generations of leftists, liberals and generally people who fight for democracy have been betrayed by the virtual leadership in Brussels and that there will be no one to replace them. So no one is crazy enough to repeat the mistakes that many promising political leaders in the Balkans have made.
The scariest thing of all is that the European Union, specifically the basic ideas on which it is based, were not needed by the Balkans for visa-free travel to Paris, but on the contrary for their values and ideas to become a balm for the wounds that this region carries.
Now that it is already becoming clear that the European Union is gone or at least that it will be gone in the foreseeable future, we can only ask ourselves what is next for us. Is it a return to the dark past of the 1990s or an even more terrifying return to the nineteenth century when the borders of the great empires will once again expand in the Balkans and the spears of discord will once again be broken here, and we all serve them only as a coin for change. At the moment this text is being written, May 28, 2025, we can definitely say: Europe, thank you for nothing.
https://www.ifimes.org/en/researches/the-lost-generations-of-the-virtual-union/5519
