But Serbia is yet to meet "the final condition for moving to this new phase in the transition process: the extradition of Ratko Mladić and Goran Hadžić to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY)," the author cautions.
Cvijic admits that "finding these two men is proving harder than expected and the government still has to convince some EU member states that it is cooperating fully" in this regard.
Nevertheless, he argues that Belgrade has renewed its efforts to improve, pointing to the ICTY's recent praise of the Serbian government's "capacity to locate fugitives and the quality of its cooperation with the tribunal".
The expert also warns that Kosovo's contested status as a nation state will "continue to weigh on Serbia's Euro-Atlantic integration process".
Still, this will not "hinder [Serbia] directly in the short term" as big decisions such as "recognition of Kosovo by the remaining five EU member states and the final status of the North Kosovo Serb enclaves will be dealt with once Serbia gets closer to EU accession," Cvijic maintains.
In light of Serbia's current cooperation with the ICTY, the "EU should also speed up the procedure for granting the country candidate status, with a view to starting formal accession negotiations as soon as possible," the author argues.
On top of this, the EU executive should "encourage and help the Serbian government to continue implementing the conditions necessary to put the country on the Schengen free-movement zone's white list," the expert argues. Indeed, "Serbia's fulfillment of the criteria should be the sole consideration" here.
But at the same time, the author emphasises that the EU should keep the two processes of integrating Serbia and settling the Kosovo issue separate, given the latter's uncertain status.
Doing so "will have a positive effect on regional stability and speed up the integration of the Balkans in the Union," Cvijic concludes.
