Identity Politics of the European Union: Customisation and Application in the Republic of Serbia

Since 1973 the EU has been seeking to forge and promote “European identity”. Often, however, only “a partial success” of the EU identity policies is reported which testifies to the fact that a unified and successful model has yet to be designed. Since political instability of the Union is, among its other manifestations, evident in the lack of identificational loyalty of its citizens, the EU has been launching new identity policies over the last decades, but each consecutive model has been characterised anew by the impossibility of implementation in each and every society alike. The reason is the discrepancy between the desired outcome (a supranational identity) and the means to accomplish it (identity policies characteristic of nation-building). The proposed project starts from the premise that, instead of a unified identity politics which is to be implemented “top-down”, certain elements of hitherto designed policies, once customised for concrete “identity markets”, should be implemented independently from the identity-packages to which they initially belonged. The growth of Euro-pessimism creates an environment not conducive to European identity formation among the citizens of the Republic of Serbia. Therefore, this project combines methodologies of basic and applied anthropological research in order to find and recommend a model of customisation of the EU identity policies that will guarantee effective results and stable identity management on the Serbian identity market.