A police motorcade takes former Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic (in the white vehicle) to face genocide charges at the U.N. war crimes tribunal near the Belgrade airport in Belgrade, Serbia, on May 31, 2011
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But membership is hardly guaranteed. Serbia joins Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Turkey, Iceland and Kosovo as an aspiring member. Within the E.U., there is growing resistance to inducting new members: "enlargement fatigue," as it has come to be known, set in after the accession of a dozen mainly East European states in recent years.
Stefan Füle, the E.U. commissioner in charge of enlargement, was one of the first people to praise Tadic for the Mladic arrest, but he also cautioned that "Serbia now must intensify work on reforms" to ensure a favorable European Commission recommendation in October. The Mladic issue aside, Serbia still has many problems — including corruption, organized crime and a bitter dispute over its former province of Kosovo — that could scupper its membership aspirations.
Kosovo is a particularly difficult sticking point. The enclave, predominantly populated by ethnic Albanians, declared independence three years ago and won the recognition of most E.U. member states. But Serbia claims Kosovo as its own territory. Tadic has vowed never to recognize Kosovo's independence, and he boycotted a late-May summit in Warsaw, attended by President Obama, because Kosovo was represented as a sovereign state.
Meanwhile, although the protests in Serbia over Mladic's arrest have begun to wane, they continue in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In Republika Srpska, the ethnic-Serb statelet hammered into Bosnia after the war and legitimized by the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, outrage over the capture threatens to boil over. On May 31, more than 10,000 protesters marched through the streets of Banja Luka, the capital, chanting praises for Mladic and calling Tadic a traitor. In Sarajevo, the capital of the ethnic-Bosnian enclave of the country, many remain unimpressed by the arrest. "This is nothing but political horse trading. For 16 years Belgrade has fidgeted and lied about Mladic's whereabouts," said Erol Avdic, a commentator for Dnevni Avaz, Sarajevo's main daily newspaper. "This soap opera about Tadic's alleged courage is a sham, and it must end."
But the end hasn't come yet. Now Tadic's security forces must turn their attention to Goran Hadzic, the last suspected war criminal wanted by the Hague tribunal. Serbia's long road to normality is far from over.
— With reporting by Leo Cendrowicz / Brussels