Serbia Learns the Hard Realities of Conditionality

Tim Judah has a good op-ed (perhaps too sympathetic to the Serbs) about Serbia's parliament passing a resolution, apologizing for Srebenica.  The Serbs are finding that they did not do enough to satisfy the Bosnians or other critics.  But satisfaction is unlikely both because politics prevents Serbia from doing much more and because people are going to read a lot into the motives.

This is one of the challenges of conditionality--you can make people meet conditions for things like membership into international institutions but that coercive element means that people will think that the effort made to meet the conditions is insincere.  Ooops.  So, this might be symbolically significant, and perhaps necessary to move the relationships a bit further down the road. 

But it is only a small step, and its significance pales in compared to other, more substantive stuff, like sending Ratko Mladic to The Hague, discouraging the Bosnian Serbs from acting up, etc.