Not long before I left Belgrade in 2003 I had a good discussion with the then Serbia and Montenegro Foreign Minister, Goran Svilanovic. An astute operator.

He said that one of the problems in dealing with the EU is that "you don’t do deals. The Americans love deals, but you don’t".

He’s right of course. Important to realise why.

The EU is essentially about Grand Process. The slow but steady if not relentless creation of a non-imperial empire.

The massive EU peers down at little Serbia from a lofty height and sends a simple message. Be absorbed. Or be ignored. Either you want in, on EU terms. Or you don’t. The rest is ‘detail’.

In this vast sense the EU side has no reason to do deals. What about? Why bother? Sooner or later the EU’s position will prevail through its sheer massiveness.

There also are operational considerations. The offering of a credible deal implies a tactical nimbleness and an ability to deliver one’s own side of the bargain.

The EU has neither, and if anything is proud of the fact. Everything needs laborious polite processing and cross-checking. The EU slogan might be "You can trust us – we are boring, and we’ll never surprise you!"

In fact to a degree which Britishers struggle to fathom, many non-EU Europeans quite like that approach. They have had centuries of being very surprised by Big European Powers storming into and across their territory, with ghastly results.

So inexorable Europeanisation takes time and patience, and EU Europeans are good at that.

But Europeanisation eg in the Balkans is much less effective than it might be since it lacks sharp, short-term methods for tackling criminal and other extremists.

The bulky EU plods across the post-communist heavily polluted brown-field Balkans, planting nice fresh seeds of reasonableness. The locals watch all this and are impressed by the EU’s methodical diligence.

Yet they also see that not far behind the EU come a small motley group of well-armed war crimes suspects and drug-smugglers, doing what they can to pour toxic waste on all those fresh seeds.

So the locals ask themselves various questions: "Does the EU not realise what is going on behind them? They must do! But why are they pretending not to? It can only be because they secretly want them there? What is really going on here?"

The EU of course does know that these villains are trying to thwart the European plan. It makes a half-hearted attempt to impose on the locals some ‘conditionality’. "You’ll get all the seeds you need only if you arrest these people and hand them over!"

But saying that while continuing to plant seeds is not really convincing. And, as every parent or dog owner learns the hard way, "You’ll get nothing if you behave badly!" all too easily morphs into "We’ll give you something if you stop being bad".

So the locals conclude that they’ll get enough of the seeds they want by doing nothing, and/or that if they are Behave Badly Enough the EU will bribe them to stop.

Plus they suspect that for all its ponderous hugeness the EU is rather … cowardly. "The EU is far bigger than us. If the EU will not risk harm to itself by nabbing these villains, why should we? And if the EU will eventually absorb us anyway, why bother to work for it? ‘Oces kafu?"

Also watching these processes are the Russians, at once highly suspicious of the EU’s non-imperial empire-building and quite keen to counter it by some quite-imperial empire-building of their own.

Their message to Serbdom? "These so-called Europeans are trying to cheat Serbia, just as they’ve always done. They are humiliating you: pretending to offer you EU membership as long as you hop down the road with Serbia’s Kosovo leg brutally cut off! By them! Is this the sort of club you want to join? Have you no pride?"

These are some of the considerations running through the political psychology of Serbia’s forthcoming elections on 11 May.

Interesting.