Cultural and Perceptional Problems in Serbia’s EU Integration: A Memetics View

Written by Srdjan Jovanović Maldoran, this article appeared on the second issue of Vol. 2 of the Journal on European Perspectives of the Western Balkans in October 2010.
 
Integrating a country into the European Union is most commonly seen as a strictly political/legal issue. The reductionist surgeon’s knife cuts out all other instances – cultural, sociological, psychological, anthropological and many others, as if countries were simple legal entities floating in a political vacuum. Such a minimalist, vastly incomprehensive view cannot give a clear picture of any state’s potential EU future, and such is the state of facts in discourse concentrating on Serbia’s EU integration proclivities.
 
In this essay, the author would like to concentrate on the cultural instances that have much to do with the integration process and see how they influence it, based on the memetics approach in cultural science. The last part of the essay concentrates on the perception and reception of the aforesaid, on the reception of those cultural instances by the academic and political community in both Serbia and the EU, where I hope to show how there are vast problems in understanding and interpreting them.