“European Values from the Perspective of the Youngest European Union Member” - transcript

Long before the European integration was on the agenda, I thought that if we were going to build ourselves a usable and citizen friendly state quickly, and it was 1991, we needed to go in the direction of the European Union, because there you had structured experience of about 15 European countries that we could use in order to build our own institutions or in order to build a state. And when we first started, I was on the academia and I thought I would get involved with that, and everybody in Croatia and across the region thought that, and I thought if we succeeded, I would one day write a book with the working title “Building a State - User Manual”. I thought that we were looking at something that was very close or the closest you could get to applying social science in the sense that you could use everything you learned and read from the age of Enlightenment onwards and use it to build real functioning institutions. It did not turn out as romantic as we thought in the beginning, because our beginning was very difficult and coincided with the war that looked very, very different from what you know from John Stuart Mill and John Lock and thereafter, but it made our task unavoidable. We stayed focused on the possibility and objective that Europe was something that would get us faster through this period of state building, transition and reaching the period of consolidation. Give us the sense of direction and deal with another thing that is pertinent for everybody in Croatia and everybody in the region, and this is long-term stability of institutions. If you look at any family in Croatia, and I can look at five generations of women in my family, including my daughter who is 28, we were all born in the same city. And the ones who died, died in the same city. And if the two of us die in the same city, we would all be born and die in the same city, but none of us would have been born and died in the same state. And that in itself shows you to what extent stability is important to us. Not only because it gives you predictability but also because each change of state was accompanied by a complete turnaround in the values, in ownership structures, the people were insecure and in fact could not pass on what they had made or earned or built during their lifetime to the next generation. The ownership structure changed what was considered positive and countries that were considered allies turned into the enemies. It was not only a matter of having changes so often, but also of destruction and consequently no confidence or very little confidence in the institutions and procedures and anything that makes things functional, safe and predictable.

So the EU, and the accession process, to us were also associated with getting as much as is possible in politics, getting the long-term guarantees of institutional continuity. We started the process in the spring of 2001, although we could also take a different date, but in 2001, we ratified the Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA). The SAA was created for us, for West Balkans countries, as an antechamber of negotiations for the membership of the European Union. We handed our application in 2003, we started the negotiations in 2005, closed them on 30 June 2011. We underwent the process of the ratification and became a full member on 1 July 2013.

So, all in all twelve years from the ratification of the SAA to full membership. However, it did not end there. There are many things that still continue. For us it was a very important procedure, it was very important experience, it was state building. It was as important as membership itself, if not more. The process of negotiations, all the reforms and adjustments that we went through were as important as membership itself. We joined the European Union at a time that was different than when we first started out, and when the first Eastern European countries joined the EU. In 2004, when the first eight countries of Eastern Europe joined the European Union there was big celebration. It was almost a continuation of the celebration of the fall of the Berlin wall, it was the symbol of the end of the Cold War. It was then welcomed by all the Member States and the population of all Member States and new Member States. All the Member States were a little bit more sceptical about the exercise in 2007, when Romania and Bulgaria joined. And then, when we came in, there occurred what was known in Europe as the enlargement fatigue. We endured all that, and when Croatia joined, there was no great euphoria in the Member States. The attitude was more like “OK, we started this and we will see it through, but thereafter we will see what happens and whether this process is going to continue and how it is going to end”. There are many reasons for that, I am sure you know them all, but in fact all these different things that happened in the meantime found less and less support in the electorates of the Member States for what was considered the most successful European policy – the enlargement. And more and more, different people who represent EU Member States obviously had to respect their electorate and how they saw the enlargement of the EU.

In the meantime, the EU went into a crisis and had to deal with austerity, fight the economic crisis, and that always makes politics less generous and tending to close off.

Another thing that happened in this process of twelve years of Croatia´s accession process was that many things that were associated with the European Union and attracted us, called the European values that we never questioned, or defined, they were a given – tolerant society, personal freedom, market economy, whole set of values associated with the increased freedom of individuals - all these things were somehow pushed aside. You are having more and more popular movements in Europe of people deciding in referendums to discriminate against minorities, to ostracise some groups within societies, and these new ideas are increasingly taking on within the European institutions. I have been lecturing  my students for a long time about the European values, and coming from the background of an one-party system with the notion of limited freedom, I took them to the European Parliament and they listened to some of the members of the EP and almost fell from the gallery because it was very different from what we were discussing as the European values and what we were trying to achieve. It was very eurosceptical and also very discriminating towards foreigners and other potential intruders into something that was considered mainstream European society. And this is an issue with which we joined the EU, and the issue Europe was facing. This is the issue of how to further maintain and advocate, champion and promote the values of the original Europe and develop them further in times of populism. In the time when the key debate within the EU is between the federalists and the advocates of greater subsidiarity i.e. greater autonomy. So, in the situation when the most sensitive part of Europe, and that is Southeast Europe from which we are the first country to join the EU, is joining the European Union, this is one of the issues posed not only to the states wanting to join the EU, but also to the actual Member States. The other thing that changed as we were undergoing the accession process was the attitude not only of the politicians but of entire societies towards the region and towards our neighbours. In the beginning, the general attitude was – our objective was for Croatia to join and not its neighbours. Over time, with this competitiveness in the region, it became clear that in order to achieve the stability of the region you needed to move the entire region towards this framework.

And this is another thing I want to draw your attention to. The EU definitely looks at the SEE and the SEE countries as enlargement potential. I think that it can be argued that considering the geography of the EU the enlargement to include the SEE countries is more the process of consolidating than enlarging territory. Because these counties are now surrounded by the countries of the EU: Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, and in order to consolidate its territory the EU needs to nudge these countries towards membership. However, I think that it also can be argued that Croatia is the last country in which the old conditionality, as one of the key instruments of European Union for bringing in new members, still worked. The conditionality in that traditional sense that the EU used was: there are requirements for you to meet, and we will wait for you to meet them and then undergo the process, after which you may join. I think it could be argued that this type of approach is not working with the countries further down in Southeast Europe, especially with the countries that are becoming increasingly destabilized, for instance Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is the key country of the region. Because influencing the stability is not the goal in itself but it is done for the sake of stability of the region. For instance, Serbia and Kosovo, where the normalization of relations was not used as a precondition for Serbia to open the negotiations, and for Kosovo to open the negotiations on the SAA; this normalization of relations became part of their negotiating framework.

I think that in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina which to a large extent is key to the region, it is important to change the approach. Instead of using this approach with difficult benchmarks and preconditions to start the process for membership, we can have a tailored approach for B-H when dealing with specific issues becomes part of the whole accession process. In other words, changes in the Constitution, implementation of the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, all the things that were preconditions and have not been met and will not be met, can be made part of the whole process in order to win the trust of the electorate. To win the trust of the people that the process is real and that the objective can be reached and through that generate some pressure from below on the leadership to move towards reforms and membership of the EU.

I will stop here and leave time for your thoughts and questions.

QUESTIONS:

EU requirements; Ukraine

The debate is going on within the European Union, and we are all witnessing what is going on in Ukraine. It all started with the signature of the AA and DCFTA at the Vilnius Summit in late November. Even last fall, before the summit, we had debates within the EU institutions about whether Ukraine met all the requirements for signing this agreement. In my opinion it would be important for the EU not to wait for the requirements to be met but to play an active role in the country to meet the requirement. I am convinced that if the EU had tried to sign this agreement three, four or five years ago, there would have been no reactions and it would have worked. That does not mean that Ukraine would have become EU Member State, but it means that Ukraine would have moved in the direction of identifying with Europe as it certainly did not meet the Copenhagen requirements at that time, and it does not meet them today, but  with the European help 3-4 years ago it may have been much closer to it than it is presently. By the same token, it is also true of Bosnia and Herzegovina and all the countries that would go that way: the traditional conditionality does not work any more.

Conditionality only works in the countries where you have the absolute overall majority of the population strongly supporting membership. Because then there is a pressure on all the political parties and politicians to go in that direction. If you do not have that, you have to help create it. Starting the process does not mean you will finish it in 5 or 10 years. Look at some countries that have been in the process for a long time without even negotiating, but this could also be way of seeing the process as helpful. You do not have to make a country a Member State before it meets all the requirements, but we must help them meet the requirements.

Q: Crisis in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Demonstrations and protests are not going to resolve things to move forward if there are no clear prospects. Few people in B-H work towards joining the EU as they do not feel that this is realistic, but if the process would launch, it could create the atmosphere. The thing that Serbia started the negotiations produced a positive signal even in B-H because it is more outspoken than B-H as a state. In this connection what Croatia can do is try to muster support in the EU and help create the momentum within the European institutions to start with this new approach towards B-H. I do not think we have to micromanage in B-H, it is not our role. But as a neighbour, we are very interested in the stability of Bosnia and Herzegovina.