The State Secretary with the Ministry for Kosovo, Oliver Ivanovic, gave an interview to beta news agency (found via B92) claiming that Serbia must join the EU and then “Europe will treat Serbia with more respect, and our position will be much better,” to re-open of the Kosovo status talk.
In other words, we’re going to treat EU with respect to enter EU in order to be respected in order to have a much better position in order to re-open Kosovo talk. That’s ridiculous. We need to respect ourselves and our own ability to guide our future, and that’s when we’ll get respect, not when we prostrate ourselves before EU diplomats.

Thankfully, back in 2008, Oliver Ivanovic also gave an interview for the “Pravda” daily (found via Ministry for Kosovo and Metohija) so we can dig into the details a bit. Ivanovic says: “Serbia must proceed towards Brussels. Once we are economically strong, politically influential, and internationally respected, we can reopen the issue of territorial integrity.” This makes two faulty assumptions that Ivanovic either knows and ignores or is ignorant about (neither of these are good options). First, it assumes that Serbia must join the EU to be a modern European economy with strong economic foundations. That, of course, is ridiculous. There is empirical evidence that countries which participate in the European market without subjecting themselves to the associated regulations of membership are wealthier than full EU members. Second, it assumes that outside the EU, Serbia would have less political influence in Europe and would be less respected in the world. At the risk of stating the obvious, a country is generally more influential if it has a foreign policy in the first place. Of course, this is undeniably true that Serbia would have less political influence in Europe. We would have little say over interest rates in Slovenia, agricultural policy in Romania or youth training in Bulgaria. Conversely, of course, we would be free to determine our own policies in areas which are currently subject to the EU.