SERBIA & MONTENEGRO: In early 1999 Hungary joined NATO only to find itself bombing its own ethnic minority and what used to be its own territory across the border into Yugoslavia. It was rotten timing and the country plunged into its usual state of pessimism. Bridget Hourican reports from Novi Sad
Famously Hungary always collaborates with the wrong power - Germany in both world wars - so it doesn't have confidence in its political choices.
Even today though a majority voted for EU membership (in a low turn-out) it's not hard to find Hungarians questioning this latest move.
But on Saturday, Hungary will hold the EU's southern border. Or rather, with Greece it will sandwich the former Yugoslavia. A sandwich doesn't make good geography and one of the former Yugoslav states - Slovenia - is getting in this round.
Negotiations for Croatia's membership (which can take anything up to 13 years, judging on the last round) are due to start shortly, but Serbia-Montenegro hasn't even been accepted as a candidate country.
In the city of Novi Sad, 100 km over the Hungarian border into Serbia, there aren't too many signs of the NATO bombing. Three of the bridges have been rebuilt, although one is floating and provisional. A fourth bridge awaiting reconstruction juts out on the Danube like a pier.
Novi Sad is a Danube town and looks like a mini, scruffier Vienna or Budapest - the great bend of river, the Hapsburg buildings, the Catholic churches, the cake shops. It's the capital of Vojvodina which was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire until after the first World War, when it was incorporated into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, the forerunner of Yugoslavia.
As well as these South Slavs, Vojvodina had: Hungarians, Bosnians, Roma Gypsies, Ruthenians, Jews, Romanians, Armenians, Slovaks, Germans and more. It was, and still is, the most multi-ethnic region in Europe.
This multi-ethnicity is Vojvodina's distinction and pride. The region was seen as a microcosm of Yugoslavia as a whole, a place where identity wasn't dominated by nationalism, where 20 ethnic groups could coexist.
Nenad Canak, speaker of the Vojvodinian parliament, president of the League of Social Democrats and a Serb, brings me through Vojvodinian history at a gallop: "In the 18th century the Austrians brought in different groups: Croats, to herd cattle, Armenians to trade, Serbs (ironic smile) as policemen."
Today Yugoslavia is no more and its multi-ethnic mono-state system is looking increasingly like mono-ethnic multi states. Slovenia only recently agreed to give citizenship to non-ethnic Slovenes; Kosovo is 90 per cent Albanian. But Vojvodina clings to its multi-ethnicity.
Hungarian students in Subortica, a town on the Hungarian border, say: "Vojvodina is in Serbia but only half the population is Serbian - less even." Statistically they're wrong - 65 per cent of Vojvodina is now Serbian, 10 years ago it was 56 per cent - but the perception is of living in a multi-ethnic region.
The Hungarians here strike me as much the best assimilated of any of the Hungarian minorities outside Hungary. Oskar, a student activist, says rather elegiacally: "They teased me in school, but I like these rough Serbs with their rude, open ways. In Hungary the people are cold - like in the West."
This, after 10 years of a war driven by Serb nationalists, is quite a statement. (Ireland is of course exempt from the Cold West - it's seen as a country of Famine, Fun and Freedom Fighters, which has just, inexplicably, imposed a smoking ban.)
Within Yugoslavia, Vojvodina was, like Kosovo, a province, which meant it had the same powers (budgetary and judicial) as the six republics - Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina - and only lacked a flag, coat of arms and anthem. Its regional parliament had five official languages, more than any other in Europe.
It was the change in the status of Vojvodina that signalled to the world that Milosevic intended to smash Yugoslavia and replace it with Greater Serbia. In June 1988 he drafted a new constitution abolishing the federal status of the provinces.
Vojvodinians held out until, on October 5th, a mob of Milosevic partisans stood outside the parliament in Novi Sad and started plastering it with yoghurt. The leadership inside called on the army to intervene. Milosevic blocked the order. The next day the leadership resigned en masse. This was the "Yoghurt Revolution".
Vojvodina's parliament was restored after Milosevic's downfall. It now has six rather than five official languages since, in the intervening years, Croat has declared its autonomy from the old language Serbo-Croat. The Serbs say kafa (coffee) and the Croats say kava and they have called the whole thing off.
The restoration of their parliament should be a cause of celebration but no one I meet in Vojvodina is celebrating.
Says Canak: "In 2000 we expected everything would change. But our parliament has no power - no judicial or budgetary rights. Our money goes straight to Belgrade. We are in a position of pure colony."
Canak has strong words but not much else these days. He was a resistance hero during the Milosevic era and a very brave man but over the past few years he's been accused of corruption. His political days are numbered and his political dream - Vojvodinian autonomy - tainted by association.
This is a region in crisis. The bombing has stopped and Milosevic is gone but the future is uncertain as ever. There is a saying in Vojvodina: "You won't die in the same country you're born in" because the name of the country changes with every generation. But now it's changing so fast, the money can't keep up - it still says Yugoslavia.
The people can't keep up either. In Subortica I encounter an extreme instance of this. On February 4th, 2003, when the country became Serbia-Montenegro, a printer and ex-gymnast, Gabric Blasko founded "Yugoslavia" on 3½ acres of his land, claiming: "Nobody has the right to rename a country without a referendum."
"Yugoslavia" doesn't look like much yet. There's a big pit which will eventually be filled with water to represent the Adriatic coast (Croatia). The earth from the pit has been heaped into a mountain that stands for Mt Triplav (Slovenia). Inside is a room dedicated to Marshall Tito, whose grandson opened "Yugoslavia" in front of a few thousand well-wishes.
In a bar, Elena, a Croat from Subortica, stick-thin and Balkan-chic, says she finds Blasko's Yugoslavia "embarrassing nostalgia". But in the 2002 census at least 60,000 Vojvodinians defined themselves as Yugoslavs.
Blasko offers all of them (and anyone else who asks) free entry to "Yugoslavia" and citizenship papers. A few kilometres up the road, Hungary is now imposing visas.
On the train everyone's papers have to be checked - there are Serbian guards, Hungarian guards and customs guards and the whole thing takes nearly two hours. An old lady asks me, through smiles and gestures, to stash a bottle of rum in my bag. When we're through she comes back for it and gestures to ask if I had any trouble.
But my bags weren't even checked. I have an EU passport.
Series concluded