EUROPEAN integration takes different forms. For governments like Serbia’s it means struggling with thousands of instructions from the EU on how to build a modern state. Yet for thousands of ordinary Serbs, since IKEA opened in Belgrade on August 10th, it means spending the weekend like millions of other EU citizens: buying furniture from the Swedish megastore and struggling with the instructions on how to put it together.

If it had been anywhere else in Europe, the opening of the 400th IKEA store would hardly have been news, let alone an occasion for national soul-searching led by Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vucic. In a newspaper article he penned an ode of praise for IKEA and Ingvar Kamprad, its founder. In his youth, wrote the president, Mr Kamprad had been a member of a wartime Swedish fascist party, but he had redeemed himself. No one in the Balkans needed to scratch their head and wonder what Mr Vucic was alluding to here. The president spent 16 years as a leading member of an extreme nationalist party whose men were infamous for murdering and looting their way across Bosnia and Croatia.

Mr Vucic says he no longer believes in the ideas that motivated him then. He says his aim is to create a modern Serbia, but that the problem is that Serbs are lazy and constantly waiting for someone to tell them what to do. Mr Vucic has often talked of his admiration for northern Europeans and their Protestant work ethic. “Wouldn’t it be great”, mocked Dejan Anastasijevic, a columnist, “if Serbia could simply be disassembled, repaired, packed into a flat box and delivered to the president.” Or even better, have Serbs “replaced by Scandinavians”.

IKEA in Belgrade is a story rich in symbol. The firm opened a small outlet in 1991, only to close a year later as Yugoslavia collapsed. Its return is a tale of the country’s delayed transition. Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia’s wartime leader, fell 17 years ago. So why did it take so long? In 2008 when the country was led by the pro-European Boris Tadic, an attempt by IKEA to return was thwarted by bureaucracy and corruption. Many liberal Serbs hate Mr Vucic for his authoritarianism and cronyism: the fact that a symbol of European normality has reopened on his watch is a bitter pill for them to swallow.