“Serbia and Montenegro await concrete steps by the European Union, such as bureaucratic and procedural concessions to facilitate the process of our country’s rapprochement with the nations that are already members of the EU”: the appeal is made by Archbishop Stanislav Hocevar, metropolitan of Belgrade, who recently intervened on the question of EU membership for the newly created Federation of Serbia and Montenegro, in a speech delivered to the European parliamentary Intergroup in Strasbourg (14 May 2003). “The Catholic Church according to Hocevar now represents the leading promoter of dialogue between East and West in the Balkans, even though the memory of the tragic events of the ethnic war in the late 1990s still remains fresh in people’s minds. That’s why the road of the country’s rapprochement with the European Union needs to be pursued with determination, also by enlisting the active support of the Serbian Orthodox Church. The closer we are united as Churches, the more rapid this process of rapprochement will be”, said the archbishop. The importance of overcoming the tragedies of the past was also underlined by the President of the Union of the two States, Svetozar Marovc, in his recent visit to Italy in early June. Marovic spoke on that occasion of Serbia’s hope to enter Europe as early as 2007, together with Bulgaria and Romania. “At Strasbourg noted Hocevar I spoke of Belgrade, with its bridges, as the symbol of the contacts between East and West, a presence that indicates the complementarity of the two European worlds”
