Romanian Review of European Governance Studies(RREGS)

Author: Vassilis Petsinis

Abstract: The advent of the third millennium saw rapid and radical changes in Serbia’s constitutional landscape. One of the debates has been the restitution of certain competencies to the assembly of Vojvodina. Since 2000, the Vojvodinian debate was overshadowed by other domestic and foreign policy priorities until it kicked off again by the end of the third millennium’s first decade. Correspondingly, by the end of November 2009, the assembly of Vojvodina and the Serbian parliament jointly adopted the new statute for Vojvodina. In this work, I focus on the political significance of the new statute for Vojvodina, as part of the broader process to set Serbia’s regionalization on novel foundations. What I try to demonstrate is that the new statute is compatible with the ‘European’ guidelines and standards on contemporary regionalization. It also comes to fill in certain gaps and ambiguities in the 2006 Serbian Constitution.

Keywords: Serbia, Vojvodina, regionalization, regionalism, European integration.