Frictionless expectations: when bioethics travels to Serbia

Over the last seven years, the European Union (EU) has promoted the institutionalization of bioethics in Serbia as part of EU citizenship. This paper looks at what it is about bioethics that makes it possible to take its universal application for granted and why are actors such as the Consul of Europe invested in transporting bioethics from their origins in the United States and Western Europe to Serbia. I start by examining discourse around institutionalized bioethics that makes transplanting of its ideas and practices appear unproblematic. Drawing on the concept of audit cultures and looking at bioethics as an audit mechanism, I show how promoting bioethics becomes an ethical end in itself. Finally, I consider how Westerners have historically construed Serbia as backwards, savage, and violent. I suggest that promoting bioethics as a condition of EU citizenship might be a means of making ethical subjects or of civilizing Serbia