On Vojvodina

Today I published an article on Vojvodina in one of the oldest Serbian daily newspapers (see here). My basic argument was that recent resolution of the European Parliament on Vojvodina was not merely the result of the pressure of Hungarian MEPs, behind such initiative lays the desire of the European Parliament to asserts its role in the foreign policy making (vis-à-vis the European Commission and the Council). For this reason it is useless for the Serbian government to reject these resolutions as mere exaggerations. Rather, it is necessary to create a lobby in the European Parliament and try to present Vojvodina in its more realistic light, thus as a multicultural Province, that has its problems (even inter-ethnic tensions) due to bad economic situation and the frustration among the young of the Province, but that the situation is improving and that there is no way back to 1990s. In order to have a strong argument to back up such lobby campaign, Serbian Government needs finally to constituionalize Vojvodina's autonomy and it needs to do this according to the best EU standards, not drawing back on constitutional models of the communist past.