Croatia: A cool reception on arrival

By Neil Buckley, FT East-European editor

Many economic doubts remain about the EU’s 28th member

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Just days after Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia, Sandra Veic Sukreski, a young journalist from Zagreb, received an ominous tip-off. Serbian fighters were gathering in woods near Osijek, in Croatia’s east. It was July 1991 and tensions between Croats and Serbs had been building for months.

After driving from Croatia’s capital, Ms Veic Sukreski stopped for coffee at her friend’s house near Osijek’s gothic cathedral. A sniper’s bullet whizzed past her boyfriend’s ear. War had returned to Europe.

Croatia’s four-year war of independence would leave 20,000 dead and 2,000 people missing; neighbouring Bosnia-Herzegovina’s was even bloodier. Ms Sukreski covered both, witnessing conflicts whose savagery echoed not just the second world war but conflicts from centuries past.

“I never thought I’d have war stories like my granny, who was born in 1921” she says.

Almost exactly 22 years after that journey to Osijek, on July 1 Croatia will become the 28th member of the EU– only the second former Yugoslav republic to join. For those such as Ms Sukreski, who lived through the war, Croatia’s EU accession marks a closure.

“I want Croatia to be seen as a normal European country, like France or the UK,” she says, “and not as some problematic Balkan war zone.”

Croatia’s entry also provides, to an EU mired in economic crisis, a reminder of its origins. Dejan Jovic, an adviser to Ivo Josipovic, Croatia’s president, says Croats view the union just as its founders did, “as an anti-war concept. They founded the EU because they had the experience of a war.”

Yet for all the symbolism, much of the EU seems unsure whether to celebrate 4.5m-strong Croatia’s entry or treat it with suspicion. There is little of the jubilation that surrounded the EU’s absorption in 2004 of eight former communist states, including Croatia’s former Yugoslav neighbour, Slovenia. That “big bang” enlargement was seen as reuniting Europe, definitively burying the cold war. Since then, backsliding in countries such as Hungary has served as a warning that EU membership does not make progress towards democracy irreversible.

More importantly, many EU governments and citizens are wary of admitting another weak southern European economy whose biggest industry is tourism. Croatia has had four consecutive years of recession, surpassed in the EU only by Greece. Joblessness is at 20% – and among young people is closer to 50%. Germany’s Bild newspaper last month dubbed Croatia set to be the EU’s “next billion-euro grave”.

For their part, Croats watching the EU’s stumbling attempts to contain the eurozone crisis wonder if they are joining “just in time for the funeral”, jokes Zarko Puhovski, a former political philosophy professor at Zagreb University.

Zoran Milanovic, the country’s Social Democrat prime minister, insists the doomsayers will be proved wrong. “We should be readier to join than any other – much readier,” he says.

Before the war Croatia and its Yugoslav neighbours might have seemed excellent candidates for EU absorption. Yugoslavia’s less stifling communism delivered higher living standards than in much of the socialist bloc. Yugoslavs wore jeans and drank Coca-Cola. They could travel and mixed freely with visitors; 10m tourists a year flocked to the 1,800km Croatian coastline. Croats seethe that Romania and Bulgaria – poorer and more repressive under communism – joined the EU before they did.

But the Yugoslav implosion left Croatia’s path to Brussels studded with landmines. Conflict degraded Croatia’s institutions and judiciary and damaged its industry. Corruption inherited from the communist era grew, which tainted the economic reforms. Franjo Tudjman（图季曼）, the nationalist first post- independence president, held competitive elections but kept tight control through bestowing patronage on handpicked officials.

Many west European capitals also thought Bulgaria and Romania, which joined the EU in 2007, were admitted too soon, without doing enough to tackle organised crime and corruption. As a result, Croatia’s entry talks, began in 2005, were more exhaustive and demanding than any previous applicant’s. Not only did Zagreb have to finish privatising its industry, reform its bureaucracy and adopt thousands of pages of EU law, it also had to hand over to prosecutors at The Hague alleged war criminals often seen as heroes at home.

It was the EU-inspired fight against corruption, however, that delivered Croatia’s most dramatic episode since the war. In December 2010, former prime minister Ivo Sanader（萨纳德） was arrested by Austrian police after fleeing Croatia facing bribery charges.

Mr Sanader succeeded Tudjman as head of the Croatian Democratic Union. European centre-right parties and leaders, including Angela Merkel, embraced him. But after his surprise 2009 resignation, Mr Sanader came under investigation.

He was alleged to have accepted a