Marek Mikuš

FIELD NOTES FRAGMENT: EU TALK(S)

A few days ago, I travelled to Bruxelles for a presentation trip of the best grantee in the first cycle of the Slovak-Serbian EU Enlargement Fund, Stevan. Stevan, a journalist working for the Econom:east magazine, used the Fund’s grant to write a series of stories on the period of Slovak ‘structural reforms’ shortly before and after the EU accession - namely, the overhauls of tax, pension and labor market policies - and how this experience could be relevant for the challenges Serbia faces. In short, Stevan argued that while the EU accession gave momentum and felicitously helped the government legitimise what were often unpopular changes, there was no direct relationship between the accession and the particularities of the reforms. Doing so, he inevitably emphasised the importance of the political and institutional conditions of transformation ‘at home’. The Slovaks and Serbs working on the project considered his work the most interesting output of the first group of grantees, and invited him for a two-day trip to Bruxelles packed with meetings with officials and representatives of EU and EU-related organisations. Stevan built new contacts, presented his work to his interlocutor, but also used the opportunity to pose a journalist’s questions. Two more people attended the meetings with us, both of them representatives of the two partners in the Slovak-Serbian EU Enlargement Fund  - Andrea of the Slovak Pontis Foundation, who prepared the trip, and Vladimir of the Center for Democracy Foundation. Meetings ranged from relatively formal to dining and wining affairs, and for some meetings, we were joined by other people with various relationships to the members of our group and motivations to participate, adding to the general feeling of heterogeneity and complexity.

However, the main cause of such impression were the highly divergent statements of EU officials with which we were confronted. On the first day of our visit, the Council of the EU was meeting in Luxembourg and deciding, among other things, on whether it will ‘forward’ Serbia’s application for membership’ to the European Commission and thus bring the country one step closer to the official candidate status. Although the Netherlands was expected to oppose such decision, in the end the Council did forward the application. In such emotionally charged atmosphere, the questions that Stevan and others of us posed to our interlocutors inevitably included the issue of Serbia’s integration process – whether it will be successful, what Serbia needs to achieve to become a member, and just how painful and slow the process will be. And some of the answers we were to hear could not, it would seem, differ any more dramatically.

We started the second day by visiting the office of Jelko Kacin, a Slovenian Member of European Parliament (ALDE) and a Vice-Chair of the EP’s Delegation for relations with Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo. Kacin is a well-known critic of Serbian politics and his comments fully met the expectations. Talking about the supposed personalisation and de-institutionalisation of Serbian politics and concentration of all factual power in Tadić’s hands, Kacin seemed to indulge in totalising, somewhat theatrical statements, such as ‘there is no government’ or ‘there is no parliament’. When he proceeded to talk about ‘accession chapters’ more specifically, the tremor of his comments was mostly negative. At one point, he announced ‘I will say a few words in Serbian’ and, addressing mostly the Serbs in our group, added: ‘Srbija ne čuje dobro’ (‘Serbia doesn’t hear well’). All of this created an image of Serbia as unable or unwilling to become a standard liberal democracy, a pupil who is rebellious and perhaps a bit thick as she clearly has some trouble ‘hearing’.

Later on the day, we met Jana Katarina Lolić Šindelková, the deputy head of cabinet of the Member of the EC for Enlargement and European Neighborhood Policy Štefan Füle. A Czech born in Bosnia with a diplomatic experience in Serbia, Šindelková communicated in a no-nonsense, good-natured manner her strong optimism and belief in the ultimate success of Serbia’s European ambitions. While Kacin barely mentioned the yesterday’s Council’s decision, Šindelková congratulated ‘to everyone who holds a Serbian passport’ and said that the commissioner’s team were happy about the decision and that they now ‘have a momentum to work with’. She denied that the EC’s 2010 Progress Report on Serbia is so negative as politicians and the media presented it, and wondered how come everyone seems to have read it when the report is a yet-unpublished internal Commission’s document. To elaborate on her point, she read a sentence from the document – ‘there was some improvement on the status of Roma’ – and then explained: ‘that is actually quite positive, because there is “little improvement” and “no improvement” below that … You have to read this report in relationship to all the other reports from that year and the report on the country from the previous year … I’m still learning this English’.

As we were walking from the Commission building into a nearby café for the final meeting of the day, Stevan has remarked on the experience of talking to Šindelková and Kacin on one day that it’s ‘typical of EU’ that their opinions would be so discrepant. Not that he was very surprised or unable to understand – he knew that the institutional position of Šindelková, as an EC official for enlargement, differs markedly from that of Kacin, an MEP free to pursue his particularist party and individual agendas. However, it was clear that the trip must have been revelatory for his understanding of the ‘EU’; he could see with acute immediacy that the EU is in some ways a fiction encompassing many different interests and agencies.

Nevertheless, thinking back to these meetings a day later, I realised that there was something important these two meetings shared, something which collapsed them into one genre and also testified that Šindelková did, after all, learn ‘the English’. When talking about ‘accession chapters’ in EU–Serbia relations, both Šindelková (as she was scanning and reading aloud from the Progress Report) and Kacin (from the top of his head) adopted a certain enumerative mode, in which they typically first identified a chapter by a few keywords, then quickly assessed Serbia’s progress and/or how costly and difficult it will be for her to meet the criteria, and finally proceeded to a next topic. Some of these labels occurred in both conversations – ‘restitution’, ‘judicial reform’, ‘ICTY’, ‘(independent) media’; some only in one of them – ‘Kosovo’, ‘electoral system’, ‘regional co-operation’, ‘the Hague’, independent regulary bodies’, ‘minorities’, ‘organise crime‘ or ‘state of law‘ (which seemed to be Kacin’s direct translation of pravna država, the Slovenian as well as Serbian variant of the English ‘rule of law’). The meaning intended by these allusions was, in varying degrees, immediately clear to everyone present, as all of us were somehow involved or interested in the EU integration process of Serbia. For instance, the mere mention of the ‘ICTY’ evoked a more specific meaning of a ‘full co-operation with the ICTY’, and even more precisely, ‘arrest Mladić and Hadžić’. That this would be an inseparable part of accession conditions was also a matter of course, as evidenced by Stevan’s reaction to Šindelková’s mention of the ICTY: ‘to sa podrazumeva’ (‘that is implied’).

What I am trying to suggest is that these labels, in the established genealogy of EU–Serbia relations, serve as easily intelligible metonyms which stand for what are believed to be well-known and agreed-upon issues. (One label that at least I had some trouble putting quickly in a context was ‘restitution’ which seems to be the new issue just being stabilised, a hypothesis corroborated by Šindelková asking herself: ‘What’s the English word?’). They migrate intertextually and interdiscursively, appear in international and Serbian media, policy documents such as the 2010 Progress Report or Kacin’s motion for a resolution that his assistant printed out for us, but also in minds of politicians, officials and citizens. In the process, they become naturalised, self-perpetuating and self-evident. They get a life of their own and an ability to shape what is thought of as possible and necessary in this particular conceptual space, and are therefore key for an analysis of how the European integration of Serbia unfolds.