Cultural Barriers to Serbia Joining the European Union

The question of culture and its influence on behaviour and decision making is unavoidable in the modern world characterized with processes of globalization, integration and intensive changes. Serious intercultural researches in the past decade confirm the importance and help us understand barriers to the process of integration. National culture is an important determinant of behaviour, decision making and problem solving faced by individuals in the society. It especially affects leadership, motivation and relations to change by unconsciously influencing basic premises about world and relations in the world, that are articulated in values, customs and behavioural norms. Serbia is in a group of European countries which are waiting to join European Union. It is not accidental that the other countries are from the same region. Therefore, in this paper we are looking for an answer to the question if and to what extent Serbian national culture and the culture of the region influence that process and what barriers it brings? To answer this question we will rely on famous intercultural studies by Geert Hofstede and group of eminent authors gathered around the Globe study. Seeing that culture is not an isolated factor, but in interaction with historical, geographic, religious, political, economical and other factors, in this paper we analyze possible influence of those factors on change of basic cultural premises and cultural divergence, or eventual convergence in a multicultural community such as European Union.