On Europe

On October 18, France stood alone in opposing the accession of North Macedonia and Albania to the European Union. High-ranking officials and leaders of the EU such as Donald Tusk, Jean-Claude Junker and Commissioner Johannes Hahn expressed dismay at the French decision. Various pundits and observers described French President Emmanuel Macron's veto as a major "mistake".

Justifying his historic "no" to opening accession negotiation with the two countries, Macon said he could not assure his people that "everything's going so well that we're going to open negotiations" if there are "thousands and thousands and thousands" of Albanians applying for asylum in France.

This fear of immigration from within Europe betrays a gaze that does not see all Europeans as equal – ie some Europeans are apparently more European than others. No wonder then that different instruments and initiatives that have been part of the European integration process are called "Europeanisation".

Belonging to a single continent, sharing similar cultural heritage and different yet intersecting histories apparently is not what "Europeanness" is. Rather, the measure for being truly European appears to be being from a rich, capitalist neoliberal state, especially a former colonial power which still enjoys some post-colonial perks. All former communist countries on the continent are expected to emulate this model through the process of so-called integration, adopting "measures", "instruments", "reforms" dictated by Western technocrats.

The premise of this process betrays a hidden assumption about tendencies towards anomie and corruption in Eastern European countries, and especially in the Balkans. As Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova has pointed out in her book "Imagining the Balkans", Western Europe balkanised the Balkans the same way it orientalised the Orient (as per Edward Said).

In this line of thought, some Western Europeans may perceive me as writing from the position of a potential "immigrant"; I assert, however, that I'm writing as a European citizen.

At the same time, being left-wing, my admission of being a Europhile might sound like a betrayal of the ideals of the left, which is habitually Euro-sceptic. However, it is not a betrayal of any sort.

I grew up in socialist Yugoslavia, where our education, our entire world view, in spite (or precisely because) of its ideological framing, was European in terms of tradition and vision of the future.

Let us not forget that socialism as an idea is based on European modernism. What is more, while growing its own brand of the socialist regime, the Yugoslav federation was quite open to Western Europe and offered its citizens free movement to the West.

After its dissolution, we all naively thought we would enter the EU immediately because, after all, we were European, we were from Europe and we thought we always had belonged to it. This expectation was spontaneous, and it felt, indeed, "natural".

Excerpted from: 'How the EU balkanised the Balkans'.

Ag AlJazeera.com