A Croatian anniversary

A quick post to apologise for the fact that in the press of things before I went on holiday, I missed the tenth anniversary of Croatia’s admission to the European Union, on 1 July. But Ivana Damjanovic, a Croatian academic and former diplomat, has rescued the event from obscurity by a nice article published last week by the Australian Institute of International Affairs.

You can compare her analysis with what I wrote at the time in 2013. I think she’s right to call this a success story; while Croatia still faces numerous problems (some of which she describes), it is in better shape than a number of countries that joined the EU earlier. It has not experienced either the democratic backsliding of Hungary and Poland or the rampant corruption and mafia politics of Bulgaria and Romania.

While EU membership has been good for Croatia, it has also been good for its neighbors and for the EU in general. For the EU to live up to its promise it needs to transcend its reputation as a rich western club, and a strong presence in the Balkans can do much to promote the cause of European peace and stability.

That leads us, however, to the most obvious significance of the anniversary: despite a lengthening queue, no further members have been admitted in the last ten years. Not since the very first enlargement, back in 1973, has there been such a long gap, and there is no end to it in sight. Although negotiations are in progress with four candidate members – Albania, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia – none of them yet seems close to admission, even though they all applied between 13 and 20 years ago.

A fifth candidate, Turkey, opened negotiations in 2005 but they have been on ice since 2016. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, fresh from a difficult re-election and trying to turn Turkey’s economy around, has recently suggested reviving them, but even on the best-case scenario that would take years and be hugely controversial in parts of western Europe.

And the three most recent candidates (none of whom have yet begun negotiations) have equally large problems: Bosnia and Herzegovina has never recovered the unity lost in the wars of the 1990s; Moldova, an artificial country detached from Romania by Stalin, is at risk of being torn apart by the war in Ukraine; and Ukraine itself is the third, a big mouthful for the EU to swallow even in peacetime, but now engaged in a war for its very survival.

As I’ve said many times before, the EU’s failure to press forward on expansion in the Balkans is foolish and short-sighted; the contrast with its success in Croatia merely underlines the point. As Damjanovic says, that success could “give an impetus to European integration and serve as a model for future EU enlargements.” But there’s no sign yet that anyone in Brussels is listening.