Austria’s interior minister Gerhard Karner recently stated that the government he is part of still believes that the Schengen area is “not functioning,” which is why they do not agree to expand it with the addition of Romania and Bulgaria. During a meeting with the Romanian interior...
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Well, you’re Serbian, yes? You are not in the EU. And you do have CEFTA. And you’ve got that Open Balkan thing.
But you don’t want just that, because it’s small, yes? Same thing applies to the EU at a larger scale.
Thing is – something that I usually point out to people from Germanic EU musing about how cool it would be if they could go break off into their own bloc – is that none of the Germanic/Latin/Slavic blocs are all that large on their own. Individually, you’ve got something like the population of a Brazil.
I’m in the US, and we’re expected to bypass the EU in population this century, and we’re a lot more-politically-integrated. Even with that, we’re the shrimp among the largest powers – as China and India develop, they’re gonna get a lot beefier in terms of clout than they are today, even if today they’re poor, because they can leverage that population.
So if the EU says “okay, not only am I gonna stay somewhat politically-not-integrated at the bloc level, but I’m gonna split into a couple of blocs” and on top of that have a smaller population than anyone else even before the bloc pie starts getting cut up, it’s gonna be tough to get enough population to have a lot of clout, I think.
I mean, that’s an option, but I’m saying that it’s inevitably going to impact the EU’s position in the world.
Serbia wants to go into the EU because it has not other alternative. And there reason there is no alternative is because the breakup of Yugoslavia was orchestrated in such a way that the republics could never reunite. After the fall of communism in the USSR, the powers that be didn’t want another socialist country to remain in Europe. But more than that, even if Yugoslavia managed to transition to a market economy while remaining a federation, the existence of Yugoslavia might have made countries like Bulgaria, Romania, and even Hungary, Belarus, and Moldova more eager to enter into some kind of a “southeast european block” than pursue a tough shock doctrine course of EU integration.
The EU will not survive the next 100 years. The countries are too different and the cultural and ideological faults are already exposed.