BELGRADE —Only two years ago Aleksandar Vucic, deputy leader of Serbia’s main oppositionProgressive Party, was a leading voice of a party that hosted tens of thousandsat nationalist rallies where indicted war criminals spoke and participants sangrousing songs vowing to fight to the last drop of blood for Kosovo.

Now, achastened Mr. Vucic flies to Brussels and Washington for meetings with Europeanand American diplomats and talks on Serbia’s inevitable path toward theEuropeanUnion and the West.

“We can’tprosper without the E.U. and the E.U. integration process,” said Mr. Vucic,newly retooled as a moderate. In his political youth, as information ministerunder the Serbian former strongman SlobodanMilosevic, he imposedpunishing fines on independent journalists who opposed the regime.

Mr. Vucicacknowledges what veteran opposition leaders dared to voice as long ago as thelate 1980s, when Mr. Milosevic was ascendant and the destruction of Yugoslavialoomed.

“The biggestproblem in Serbia is not Kosovo,” Mr. Vucic said in an interview. “It is theSerbian economy, unemployment, corruption, and low living standards.”

Twenty-fiveyears after Serbian intellectuals and politicians began brewing the Serbs’ deephistorical attachment to Kosovo into a toxic chauvinism that stoked years ofwar, Serbia is shedding virulent nationalism. It is a fundamental shift in thepolitical landscape of a poor but still worldly Balkan country newly determinedto integrate with Europe.

With theglobal financialcrisis roiling economiesacross the western Balkans, the impulse to end isolation and join the EuropeanUnion is felt across the region. From Macedonia to Montenegro to Kosovo,governments look to Brussels in hope that stronger integration with the world’sbiggest trading bloc will help deliver economic salvation.

Across theborder in Bosnia, the prospect ofjoining the European Union could help bind the fragile multiethnic countrytogether after the economy shrank 3.4 percent last year. Yet analysts fear thatparliamentary and presidential elections on Sunday may accentuate ethnicdivisions, making European integration even more elusive.

Indeed,Bosnia could even break apart, with the Bosnian Serb leader, Milorad Dodik,making ever louder noises about tearing down the ineffectual, byzantineinstitutional arrangement that diplomats cobbled together in 1995 to halt threeand a half years of war in the heart of Europe.

Otherremnants of the old Yugoslavia, however, are doing better. Slovenia is aprospering member of the E.U. and NATO; Croatia, itssouthern neighbor, hopes to follow it into the Union. Montenegro, small andmired by organized crime, is still on an upward trajectory. Even fledglingKosovo, desperately poor and struggling to overcome corruption, is finallygaining greater international legitimacy.

In Serbia ,cautious optimism is growing. In October, Secretary of State HillaryClinton is expected to visitBelgrade and to reaffirm Washington’s support for a Serbia firmly ensconced inEuropean structures. That support has particular resonance given America’s role,when Mrs. Clinton’s husband was president, in leading the 1999 NATO bombing ofSerbia, which aimed to stop Mr. Milosevic’s repression of Kosovo’s ethnicAlbanians.

The hopethat Serbia has entered a new era in relations with the West was fanned on Sept.9 when Belgrade supported a compromise UnitedNations resolution on Kosovothat dropped its earlier demand to reopen talks on the status of its formerterritory.

Instead,senior Serbian officials have backed the idea of E.U.-mediated talks withKosovo, which declared independence from Serbia in February 2008 with the firmbacking of the United States and a majority of E.U. nations.

Thecompromise marked a significant climb-down for the government in Belgrade, whichhas made joining the E.U. its overriding goal, even as it has remainedunequivocal that it considers Kosovo its medieval heartland and has fought anunsuccessful campaign to have Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independencedeemed illegal. (In July the international Court of Justice in The Hague said itdid not breach international law).

Days later,Serbia announced that it had indicted nine Serbian former paramilitaries knownas the Jackals over the killing of 43 ethnic Albanians during the 1998-99 Kosovowar.

Many Westernobservers here interpreted the indictments as the latest sign that thedetermination of Belgrade to join the E.U. was finally coaxing Serbia into areckoning about its role in the bloody Balkan wars of the 1990s.

While Serbiahas yet to seize RatkoMladic, the Bosnian Serbgeneral whose arrest is a condition for Serbia to join the E.U., the SerbianParliament in April passed a resolution condemning Mr. Mladic’s most heinouscrime: the mass murder of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in1995. In a country where Mr. Mladic is still seen by many as a hero, theresolution was bold.

NatasaKandic, a leading Serbian human rights activist, said a conjunction ofpolitical, economic and social circumstances had made Mr. Mladic’s arrestpossible, while easing the country’s path toward the west.

“Politiciansacross the spectrum have given a clear message related to Mladic that sayscooperation with The Hague is a priority,” she said, referring to theinternational war crimes court. “This has not been met with the resistance ordemonstrations of the past because ordinary people are fed up with Serbia’sisolation. This is a fundamental change.”

Underlyingthe about-face in Serbian politics, analysts say, is the country’s pragmaticPresident Boris Tadic, a bland but telegenic former psychology teacher who hasbecome a favorite in Brussels and Washington.

While Mr.Tadic has long supported the European Union, analysts noted that the moresurprising development is the transformation of former arch-nationalists likeMr. Vucic.

Mr. Vucicexplained that cold-headed economic pragmatism was trumping the nationalism ofthe past. He noted that about 60 percent of Serbs supported E.U. accession andwere willing to compromise in return for economic prosperity.

Last year,Serbia, with foreign investment drying up and tax revenue waning, turned to theInternationalMonetary Fund for a €3 billionbailout.

As otherex-communist countries now in the E.U. and NATO have prospered, the averagemonthly wage in Serbia is about 320 euros, one of the lowest in Europe.Unemployment in April was officially 19.2 percent.

Whileeconomic pain may have produced a more conciliatory stance, Serbian observersand western diplomats stressed that key challenges remained, particularly Kosovoand handing Mr. Mladic over to the international court.

Tellingly,the recent U.N. GeneralAssembly session on Kosovowas delayed for three hours after Serbian officials balked at even being in thesame room as their ethnic Albanian counterparts.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/02/world/europe/02iht-serbia.html
 

• A Permanent Economic Emergency