100 Years on Serbia Faces Another Memorandum

Daniel Hannan: “If I were Serbian, I would be very reluctant to surrender the advantages of a relatively educated workforce and relatively cheap exports to assimilate the corpus of EU social and employment law, but that is their decision.”

Source: DanHannanMEP YouTube channel.

Translated by Jadranko Brkic.

(see video below transcript)

Transcript:

Thank you Mr Deputy Speaker. The way in which the European Union has evolved from being essentially a trading organisation into a political one is reflected in the higher and more exacting standards applied to each new accession round. It is no longer a question of countries being able to sustain the obligations of the free market; we are increasingly making demands that touch on their judicial systems and their foreign policies. I will take the same attitude to Serbia that I took to Croatian accession and that I would take to any of the other South Slavic or Balkan countries.

If I were Serbian, I would be very reluctant to surrender the advantages of a relatively educated workforce and relatively cheap exports to assimilate the corpus of EU social and employment law, but that is their decision. If they vote to join, I will support it, as I did in the case of Croatia. I do have to wonder, though, at the lack of historical imagination here on our side that, in this centenary year of the Austro-Hungarian Memorandum to Serbia, we think nothing of making it a precondition that Serbia puts foreign powers in charge of its judicial system.