The Nation State and the EU in the Perceptions of Political and Economic Elites: The Case of Serbia in Comparative Perspective

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Notes

¹In this way, the ‘classical’ argument is confirmed: ‘… the attribution of the superiority of European states to the liberty incorporated in their administration of the res publica, which stood in opposition to the arbitrary disposal of power typical of despotism, whether oriental or not’ (Woolf 1991, p. 7).

²For detailed discussion on this process which we call ‘blocked transformation’, see Lazić (2004) and Lazić and Cvejić (2007).

³In a survey carried out a few months after the war with NATO it was found that the majority of the population was still pro-EU. The explanation for such a seemingly contradictory situation was that they blamed ‘politicians’—Milošević and NATO leaders—for the war, and not ‘the people’ of EU countries. For further discussion, see Lazić (2000b).

⁴A 2004 survey shows that relatively high levels of nationalism persist among all strata except professionals and parts of the economic and political elite. For further details, see Lazić and Cvejić (2007).

⁵The Serbian Radical Party (Srpska radikalna stranka, SRP) represents the strongest individual party in Serbia, and together with the Socialist Party of Serbia (Socijalistička partija Srbije, SPS), had the support of one third of voters at the parliamentary elections in 2007. Recently, after the parliamentary elections in 2008, the SPS entered the coalition government as a minority partner of the pro-European Democratic Party (Demokratska stranka, DP), by declaring also to be a supporter of Serbia gaining EU membership.

⁶Such policies would include lessening state control over its territory and population, over the national defence and law and order apparatus, and over the collection and redistribution of taxes. For further discussion on the constitutive elements of the state, see Tilly (1990).

⁷These included 17 members of the government and 63 members of the parliament; 48 respondents belong to parties that formed the majority in the parliament and made up the government, while 32 belonged to opposition parties.

⁸These included top managers or majority owners, selected among the 250 largest Serbian firms, in the public and private spheres and across all sectors, including industry, finance and services.

⁹We constructed the Index using the following 10 variables: attachment to a country (variable id01c); attachment to the EU (id01d); scale of unification (rp08); whether ‘the member states should remain the central actors of the European Union’ (rp08_a); whether ‘the European Commission should become the true government of the European Union’ (rp08_b); whether ‘the powers of the European Parliament should be strengthened’ (rp08_c); single European Army or national armies (rp08_2); the character of the European Union in 10 years—unified tax system (sg03_1); common system of social security (sg03_2); and single foreign policy (sg03_3). Reliability analysis showed that Alpha = 0.7201.

¹⁰IOEU_2 is actually an adapted and upgraded IOEU. In fact, we replaced missing cases with the average of existing values in existing variables. The procedure is not quite correct, but in our opinion the resulting error is significantly less than if we eliminated the missing cases (only cases where five or more variables had missing values were excluded from the analysis). New computing gives us IOEU_2 which we use in the analysis.

¹¹Values of IOEU_2 have a distribution from 10 to 40. Cases with values between 10 and 24 we defined as national oriented cases; cases with values between 25 and 40 we defined as EU oriented. Alternatively, we made a variable (O_2) with four values: strong national orientation, weak national orientation, weak EU orientation and strong EU orientation. Cases with values between 10 and 20 were defined as ‘strong national oriented’ (value 20 was defined as the upper line, because in a hypothetical case it meant that respondents gave an answer at each selected question with maximum value of 2). Cases with values between 30 and 40 were defined as strong EU oriented. Weak state oriented cases were defined by values between 21 and 24, and weak EU oriented cases were defined by values between 25 and 29.

¹² T-test value sig. = 0.001, t(df) = –3.085(118); political elite mean = 26.8606; economic elite mean = 29.6910.

¹³It is interesting that a clear link between self-orientation on the left–right axis and orientation toward the EU does not exist. The main reason for this lies, in our opinion, in a very confused interpretation of the political left and right in contemporary post-socialist countries, and particularly in Serbia (in view of the fact, for example, that during Milošević's regime, the closest coalition party to his Socialist Party was the extreme-right Radical Party (Srpska radikalna stranka, SRS)).

¹⁴We did not find statistically significant difference between those two variables. In the linear regression model B = –3.97E-02, sig. = 0.320, R ² = 0.008.

¹⁵This included Belgium, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Great Britain, Italy, Slovakia and Spain on the one hand, and Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Poland and Portugal, on the other. We put the Czech Republic and Slovakia into the first group on the basis of the assumption that the recent dissolution of a common state makes them closer to countries with a secessionist experience even if their sovereignty has not been threatened by any external or internal actor (data in Table 3 below, corroborate our decision).

¹⁶In this case we divided countries into four groups: ‘establishers’ (Belgium, France, Germany and Italy, and Denmark which became a member in the 1970s); ‘followers’ which became members in the 1980s (Greece, Spain, Portugal and Austria), ‘newcomers’ (the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Estonia, Lithuania, Hungary and Bulgaria) and non-members (Serbia). The division between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ members would simply repeat the division between post-socialist and older capitalist countries. We excluded Great Britain, which joined in the 1970s because it is an outlier with exceptionally low levels of EU-orientation.

¹⁷Some unexpected values in Table 3 obviously need further explanation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mladen Lazić

We would like to thank José Pereira, Slobodan Cvejić and Mladen Ostojić for comments regarding the contents of the essay, and Romy Danflous for correcting our numerous English mistakes.