EU could change Balkans at a stroke, says Serbia

BLED, Slovenia, Aug 27 (Reuters) The European Union could change the Balkans at a stroke by giving membership candidate status to countries still uncertain whether the bloc really wants them, Serb Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic said today.

Jeremic told leaders at the Slovenian Strategic Forum in Bled that lack of a clear incentive from the EU was hindering political and economic reform.

''Some 20 million inhabitants of the European continent, here in our region, await a signal: is it business as usual, or will we be galvanised by the prospect of imminent candidacy and membership?,'' he said.

''If it is business as usual ... we will have the usual politics of transitional states. Because the future does not beckon, the past will likely prevail.'' Croatia and Macedonia are already EU membership candidates.

Bosnia, Montenegro and Albania are potential candidates, as is Serbia, whose progress towards the 27-member bloc is heavily burdened by the unresolved status of Kosovo and failure to arrest war crimes fugitive Ratko Mladic.

The EU wants all of them to join eventually but is trying to balance incentives with conditions. Some critics say there is not enough carrot and too much stick from Brussels.

''If we do have that prospect, the prospect of imminent belonging, then everything changes,'' said Jeremic, a member of the most pro-EU party in Serbia's coalition government.

''All our economic incentives will be turned on their heads.

The corrosive isolation of visa restrictions that currently hangs over us like a thick fog will be lifted,'' he added.

Jeremic's Democratic Party, led by President Boris Tadic, is regularly outpolled in elections by the ultranationalist Radical Party, which extols the image of a fortress Serbia heroically resisting the West's humilitating conditions.

Supporters of Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica, a nationalist who says NATO is trying to create its own state in the breakaway province of Kosovo, warn that Serbia could turn its back on EU membership if forced to give up the territory.

Reuters RAR RN1645