European Union leaders gave the go-ahead on Friday for Croatia to join the EU, after six years of preparations marred by slow democratic reforms in Zagreb and the EU's reluctance to expand. The former Yugoslav state of 4.4 million people should be able to wrap up accession negotiations next week, they said at a summit in Brussels, but warned the Zagreb government that it has to continue to fight widespread corruption with "vigour".
The recommendation marks a turnaround for Croatia, which struggled for years to convince the EU's 27 governments that its judiciary reforms would produce genuine results and prove it has recognised its role in the Balkan wars in the 1990s. However, its efforts will face more EU scrutiny, and its hopes of joining the EU in July 2013 could be jeopardised if reform slip-ups persuade some of the EU's national parliaments to delay ratifying the accession treaty.
"Now it is important to ensure that Croatia's reforms are sustainable and irreversible," Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said. Several EU governments, led by Britain and the Netherlands, pushed for strict monitoring of Croatia during the ratification process and had insisted that the completion of talks remains open-ended.
But others wanted a more clear message. Many EU politicians are hopeful that rewarding Croatia for a last-minute reform push will persuade other governments in the western Balkans that the EU is willing to accept new members if they are ready. "Croatia demonstrates that if a country meets our strict conditionality, we as the European Union respect our commitments," European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso told a news conference.
EU enlargement is likely to remain on the backburner in the coming years, however, with voters around the continent wary of its cost at a time of economic austerity, but policymakers are eager to unlock democratic reforms in the Balkans. Referring to Croatia's accession progress, the EU leaders said in a statement: "These developments bring a new momentum to the European perspective of the western Balkans, provided these countries continue on the path of reform."
They also offered encouragement to Serbia, which hopes to win the official status of EU candidate in the coming months, after the arrest of Ratko Mladic, a wartime general wanted by a United Nations tribunal on genocide charges. Apprehending Mladic "constitutes a positive step for international justice as well as for Serbia's EU perspective", they said.
Croatia's reluctance to come to terms with its own past during the bloody collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s had also hurt its EU aspirations in recent years. During the 1993-94 Croat-Muslim conflict in Bosnia - a brief but bloody side-show to the main war with the Bosnian Serbs - Zagreb backed, financed and armed hard-line kin in Bosnia, who wanted to ethnically cleanse their territory and join Croatia.
One reason behind Croatia's leap towards accession in recent months, EU diplomats say, was the arrest of former prime minister Ivo Sanader, who had been sought on charge of graft. Croatia also got a push from the Hungarian government, which lobbied strongly to wrap up negotiations during its six-month presidency of the EU that ends next week.
Hungary and Croatia have shared a joint history for centuries, since Croatia was part of the Hungarian kingdom. Budapest's first freely elected government after the fall of communism actively supported Croatia's efforts to secede from Yugoslavia. Croatia, the richest of EU hopefuls in the Balkans and which relies heavily on tourism, is hoping that accession will bolster its appeal to foreign funds at a time when Europe's financial woes have slashed direct investment in the region. "We have worked hard for six years and we deserve this," Croatia's state secretary for European integration, Andrej Plenkovic, told Reuters in an interview.
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