The European Union is by far the largest infrastructural, institutional, reform and investment pillar of Serbia in the last 20 years. By 2018, the EU has donated over 3.5 billion euros to Serbia, and individual EU members have added another half a billion. If we add cheap loans – another 4.5 billion for gentlemen by 2018. There are almost all renovations, equipment and construction of schools and health institutions. Enormous material and financial assistance after the floods of 2014 and the Covid-19 crisis in the last year.
For the sake of comparison, the revenue side of the budget of Serbia in 2021 is around 11.5 billion euros. So far, the EU has provided us with almost an entire annual budget. Serbia would not look like itself without the EU.
However, if a man, who woke up today from a 20-year-old coma, was reviewing media headlines, he would say that the support of the EU is, at best, in the rank of the support of China, Russia or the UAE. Why is it so? Why don’t we publicly appreciate the construction of Serbia?
Media treatment
Most news media in Serbia are under the direct control of the authorities. Almost all of them are politically openly against European integration, except when it suits the authorities to write differently in them. This is explained by the volume of the minority that is against Serbia’s entry into the EU – the government does not want to resent that part of the population in the public arena, which does not exceed a third of the population. The silent majority of Serbia has understood for decades that it is not good for Serbia to be outside the European community of nations. The number of agile people who move every year, not to China, not to the UAE, especially not to Russia, speaks even more about that. All of them are moving to the countries of the West, above all the European Union, and there they see room for achieving their happiness. That silent majority and the people who essentially disappeared from the map of Serbia are not fools. Whether they are voters of the government or not, they are resistant to the poisons that are served to them, because it is clear to all of them that the EU is a space in which they and Serbia as a whole can develop.
Non-regime and anti-regime media, especially in recent years, have refrained from openly supporting EU support for Serbia because Euro-elites support the government. Even those civic-minded. The news of the announcement that the EU will help build the Belgrade-Nis-Presevo railway with 600 to 700 million euros was not interesting to most such media in Serbia today. Although intangible at first glance, 600-700 million euros is probably the largest external support for an individual project in Serbia in the last few decades. Despite that, today’s news was not in the top 5 with almost any pro-European, and especially not media that are under direct Russian control or internal mental anti-European (today, therefore, anti-Serbian) control. That is unfortunate.
The burden of the past
The 1990s left a serious scar on the faces of all peoples and nationalities of the former Yugoslavia. In the case of Serbia, it is read in disgust towards the civilized part of the West, with which we as a state were in conflict for the first time in history. By the way, the defining identity issue of Kosovo is still an obstacle in the perception of the EU’s friendly attitude towards Serbia. Ten years of propaganda by the dictatorial Milosevic regime have further fueled that odium and created in the minds of generations the image that everything that comes – from there – is bad or at least a hoax.
Therefore, when billions of euros of aid come from the same West, ambulances, school boards and gyms, salaries for medics, a new highway or help in recovering from the worst floods in a generation, we are not particularly fascinated. It is a factor that is very difficult to change and that must be worked on for generations.
Insufficient EU communication
Although some will say that this is the primary factor of insufficient (only 55%!?) support for Serbia’s accession to the EU, that is far from the truth. But the truth is – the EU usually communicates with the public in Serbia inadequately, recklessly, bureaucratically crippled. Simply making excellent conclusions, indisputably true, that the EU has helped Serbia more than anyone in the last 20 years, is not enough. Especially not when there is no media support. The local EU administration in Serbia is less responsible than bureaucrats related to Brussels institutions. The recent tweet of the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, about the new gift of the EU – a powerful 36,000 doses of vaccines against Covid-19 by August, became a subject of ridicule. Not because it is bad that the EU will donate vaccines to 18,000 people, but because Serbia procured, paid for and applied millions of doses of vaccines from various manufacturers with a stick and string, surprising the whole world with the successful start of the vaccination campaign.
This is a vivid example of completely reckless communication, but what is the essential objection here, if the reality is that probably all the vaccines that Serbia procured were actually paid for by the EU?
The truth is brutal – the EU has defined Serbia’s progress in the last 20 years. And the perception of that truth will have to be worked on on several fronts, Talas reports.
