Twenty-five years since the collapse of the Socialist Federated Republic of Yugoslavia, and fifteen years since the end of the criminal regime of Slobodan Milošević, Serbia is still struggling with consolidating a liberal democracy. Serbia today continues to sit in the waiting room of European Union (EU) enlargement, its target date of accession being pushed back each year, now looming in the distant 2020.

So how much has really changed since 2000? In many ways, Serbia has not gone through a democratic transformation since the overthrow of Milošević. The pernicious legacies of his rule – virulent nationalism, clericalization of society, abuse of human rights, rampant corruption, and poor quality of life – remain. Even visually, in 2014, the Serbian cabinet resembled a Milošević-era government. At the time of writing, the post of prime minister is occupied by Aleksandar Vučić, who was Milošević's information minister during the 1990s. Vučić was also a high-ranking member of the Serbian Radical Party (SRS), an extreme right wing party, the armed paramilitary wing of which was implicated in multiple atrocities in the Croatian and Bosnian wars, and the leader of which, Vojislav Šešelj, on trial at The Hague for war crimes for much of the last decade, has in 2014 secured a medical release from detention and has returned to Serbia, where he has continued his unapologetic warmongering provocations. Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Ivica Dačić, who was also recently the country's foreign minister, was not only a member of Milošević's Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS), but was Milošević's spokesman throughout the 1990s. So what, exactly, has changed, fifteen years on?

Since Serbia started on the long road toward EU accession in 2000, it has delivered on quite a few EU demands. Most notably, it has finally fulfilled the longstanding requirement to cooperate fully with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) by arresting the last few Hague fugitives, including top Bosnian Serb wartime leaders Radovan Karadžić in 2008 and Ratko Mladić in 2011. In 2013, Serbia relented under European pressure and signed an interim agreement with Kosovo. The agreement commits Serbia to respect the Kosovo government's control over its territory, in exchange for limited Serb autonomy in the north and Serbia's continuing official non-recognition of Kosovo as an independent state.