Only two years ago, Aleksandar Vucic was the leading voice of an opposition political party in Serbia that invited people indicted for war crimes to speak at nationalist rallies. Participants sang rousing anthems vowing to fight to the last drop of blood for Kosovo, which has become a breakaway state. Now, a chastened Vucicflies to Brussels and Washington for meetings with European and U.S. diplomats and talks of Serbia's inevitable path toward the European Union and the West. 'We can't prosper without the E.U. and the E.U. integration process,' said Vucic, who as information minister under the former Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic imposed punishing fines on journalists who opposed the government. 'The biggest problem in Serbia is not Kosovo,' Vucic said in an interview. 'It is the Serbian economy, unemployment, corruption and low living standards.' Vucic's transformation mirrors that of his country. Twenty-five years after intellectuals and politicians here began building the Serbs' deep historical attachment to Kosovo into a toxic chauvinism that stoked years of war, Serbia is shedding its virulent nationalism. It is a fundamental shift in the political landscape of a poor but still worldly Balkan country newly determined to integrate with Europe. With the global financial crisis battering economies across the western Balkans, countries throughout the region are moving to end their isolation and push for entry into the European Union. From Macedonia to Montenegro to Kosovo, governments are looking to Brussels with hopes that stronger integration with the world's biggest trading bloc will help deliver economic salvation. In Bosnia, where the economy shrank 3.4 percent last year, the prospect of joining the European Union could be essential to helping bind the fragile multiethnic country together. Analysts say that possibility could become especially important if, as they fear, parliamentary and presidential elections Sunday accentuate dangerous ethnic divisions that could tear the country apart. In Serbia, cautious optimism for better integration with Europe is growing. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to visit Belgrade in October and reaffirm Washington's support for a Serbia firmly ensconced in European structures. That support has particular resonance given the United States' role, when Clinton's husband was president, in leading the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia, which aimed to stop Milosevic's repression of Kosovo's ethnic Albanians. The hope that Serbia has entered a new era in relations with the West spread Sept. 9 when Belgrade supported a compromise U.N. resolution on Kosovo that dropped its demand to reopen talks on the status of its former territory. Instead, senior Serbian officials have backed the idea of talks -- mediated by the European Union -- with Kosovo, which declared independence from Serbia in February 2008 with the firm backing of the United States and a majority of E.U. nations. The compromise was a significant accommodation for the government in Belgrade, which has made joining the European Union its overriding goal, even as it has remained unequivocal that it considers Kosovo its medieval heartland and had fought unsuccessfully to have Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence deemed illegal. (In July the International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled that it did not breach international law.) Days after supporting the compromise, Serbia announced that it had indicted nine Serbian former members of a paramilitary group known as the Jackals over the killing of 43 ethnic Albanians during the 1998-99 Kosovo war. Many Western observers here interpreted the indictments as the latest sign Belgrade's determination to join the European Union was finally coaxing Serbia into a reckoning about its role in the Balkan wars of the 1990s. While Serbia has yet to seize Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb general whose arrest is a condition for Serbia to join the union, the Serbian parliament in April passed a resolution condemning the massacre of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica, Bosnia, in July 1995; Mladic is widely considered to be the chief planner and organizer of the killings. In a country where he is still seen by many as a hero, the resolution was telling. Natasa Kandic, a leading Serbian human rights advocate, said a conjunction of political, economic and social circumstances had now made Mladic's arrest possible. 'Politicians across the spectrum have given a clear message related to Mladic that says cooperation with The Hague is a priority,' Kandic said, referring to the location of the international court set up to try war criminals from the former Yugoslavia. 'This has not been met with the resistance or demonstrations of the past because ordinary people are fed up with Serbia's isolation. This is a fundamental change.' Vucic, the former minister under Milosevic, noted that about 60 percent of Serbs supported E.U. accession and were willing to compromise in return for economic prosperity. Last year, Serbia, with foreign investment drying up and tax revenue waning, turned to the International Monetary Fund for a $4 billion bailout. While other former Communist countries now in the European Union and NATO have generally prospered, the average monthly wage in Serbia is about $440, one of the lowest levels in Europe. Unemployment in April was officially 19.2 percent. While economic pain may have produced a more conciliatory stance, Serbian observers and Western diplomats emphasized that crucial challenges remained, particularly Kosovo and handing Mladic over to the international court. Tellingly, the recent U.N. General Assembly session on Kosovo was delayed for three hours after Serbian officials balked at even being in the same room as their ethnic Albanian counterparts. The impasse was eventually ended by signing in the Albanians as guests of five Western countries. 