On December 1, 2016, 28 NATO Allies agreed to invite Montenegro to begin accession talks to become the twenty-ninth member of the Alliance. The accession process is scheduled to take 12-18 months and will be finalized when all Allies have ratified the accession protocols which are then deposited in Washington, DC.

If you declare a nation that no other nation recognizes, is it still a nation? Such is the quandary of Vit Jedlicka, a Czech politician and founder of Liberland, a 3-square-mile speck of land between Croatia and Serbia that he plans to turn into a little dynamo of a country. If only the world will let him. 

All happy speeches are alike. All unhappy speeches are different in their own particular way. We connoisseurs of the diplomatic public speaking art are fortunate to have one example of a high-profile public speaking occasion where everything that could possibly go wrong did indeed go wrong. If you are working at an Embassy or in a Foreign Minister’s office and are looking for a model for how not do it, seek no further.

It will be the 28th member state, the first since Bulgaria and Romania back in 2007, and will open the door for much-needed investment in a country facing its fifth year of recession, and 40 percent of youth unemployment. The problem is that the EU is not a model of stability itself these days, leading us to a question, who exactly is getting the better deal here?

Since the end of the cold war, the European bloc’s soft power, its ability to press for concessions, has been a powerful foreign policy tool and an alternative to American military might. In the case of Croatia, the incentive of joining the union pushed it to revamp a statist post-Communist economy, pass more than 350 laws and arrest more than a dozen Croatian and Bosnian-Croat war criminals.

Some will say that after a considerable amount of time, expansion is the first piece of good news coming from Old Lady Europe. However, not everyone is enthusiastic about it, especially in Croatia – the 28th member as of July 1st. To put it more clearly, the very first toast could leave some with a bad taste in their mouth should they make it with prosek – the indigenous Dalmatian dessert wine variety. Accession to the EU could mean – hello EU, goodbye prosek!