protesters know very well what they don’t know; they don’t pretend to have fast and easy answers; but what their instinct is telling them is nonetheless true – that those in power also don’t know it. In Europe today, the blind are leading the blind.
Srećko Horvat
4 WHY THE EU NEEDS CROATIA MORE THAN CROATIA NEEDS THE EU
When in late 2005 the accession negotiations between Croatia and the EU officially started, a leading Croatian liberal daily triumphantly published the following headline all over its front page: ‘Bye, bye Balkans!’ At that time, this was the prevailing and typical stance towards the European Union: some sort of ‘self-fulfilling mythology’ of the Balkans as a region needing to be ‘civilised’ by integration into the West. Only eight years later, as Croatia finally becomes part of the European Union, neither the EU nor the Balkans has the same image anymore. Today’s situation is somehow reminiscent of the famous joke about a patient whose doctor makes him choose whether to hear the bad or the good news first. Of course, the patient chooses first to hear the bad news. ‘The bad news is you have cancer,’ says the doctor, ‘but don’t worry, the good news is you have Alzheimer’s, so when you get home you will already have forgotten about the first predicament.’ Doesn’t that sound just like the situation with Croatia’s EU accession, where the bad news is that Croatia is experiencing a political and economic crisis, with corruption affairs erupting almost on a daily basis and unemployment rates rising as well, and the good news is: ‘Don’t worry, you will enter the EU’?
‘A clear majority in favour of EU accession’ is how the teletext of the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation reported on the referendum in Croatia regarding the country’s EU membership. And indeed, two-thirds of the votes cast said ‘Yes’. But taking into account the historically low turnout in the referendum of 43 per cent, this means that actually not more than 29 per cent of the population entitled to vote spoke out in favour of EU accession. On the eve of Croatia’s EU referendum, the former war general Ante Gotovina, recently released from his ICTY prison cell in The Hague, and who had once been the biggest obstacle to the Croatian negotiations with the EU, sent an epistle to the Croatian people urging them to vote in favour of the EU. At the same time, the two biggest Croatian parties, the Social Democrats (SDP), now in power, and the Conservatives (HDZ), the former ruling party, together with the Croatian Catholic Church, did everything to convince the voters that ‘there is no alternative.’
Only a few days before the referendum, the foreign minister even went so far as to point out that pensions would not be paid unless the vote was ‘Yes’. And, thanks to a ‘Yes’ campaign that cost around 600,000 euro, the main arguments were a similar type of ‘blackmail alternative’, among which the most frequent was: ‘If we don’t enter the EU, we will stay in the Balkans.’ In such an atmosphere it is no surprise that the referendum on Croatia’s accession to the EU recorded the lowest turnout among all current member states. With an attendance of only 43 per cent of its citizens, Croatia has beaten the previous record holder, Hungary, where the referendum was attended by 45 per cent. One possible explanation was nicely formulated by Croatia’s prime minister after the first official results: ‘Afraid that the referendum might fail, we changed the Constitution’, involuntarily echoing the famous proverb by Bertolt Brecht: ‘When government doesn’t agree with the people, it’s time to change the people.’ Not only were the rules of the referendum indeed changed in 2010 because of the EU accession, but also other (legal, economic etc.) things were settled beforehand.
When, only six days after Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation which triggered the ‘Arab Spring’, 41-year-old TV engineer Adrian Sobaru attempted to commit suicide during the Romanian prime minister’s speech in parliament by throwing himself off the gallery dressed in a T-shirt saying, ‘You have killed our children’s future! You sold us!’ almost no-one took this as an indication of what was going to happen in the European Union. Only a year later, thousands of Romanians protested against austerity measures (mainly provoked by the privatisation of the healthcare system). Unlike at the time of the enlargement of the European Union in 2004 or 2007, there is no optimism in the air anymore – and yet, Croatia is joining the club.
Only last year the EU was facing huge protests and several general strikes from Spain, Portugal and Greece to England, Hungary, Romania and future member state Croatia.13 And there is a new anti-democratic tendency in the EU, which does not only manifest itself in the success of right-wing movements (Golden Dawn, etc.) and governments (Viktor Orbán). An even bigger threat to democracy is the new technocrat elites in power; people who are actually provoking new nationalist tendencies and who all have one thing in common: they all worked for Goldman Sachs; people such as Mario Monti, Mario Draghi or Lucas Papademos. Actually, the last one is the best example for what is wrong with the EU today. If we play with the etymological meaning of ‘papa’ (which means ‘father’ and ‘goodbye’), at the same time you have a ‘father of the people’ (Papa demos) and someone who is saying ‘goodbye to the people’ (Pa-pa demos). When we spoke about this weird congruity, Slavoj Žižek made a brilliant Hegelian synthesis: if you put the two together, you have neither more nor less than the mythology of Saturn who is eating all of its children, except Jupiter! (Namely, ‘papa’ in Croatian and Slovenian language also means ‘eating’.)14
Actually, the Croatian referendum was another symptom of the EU’s democratic deficit. We had a referendum after everything was already settled. We did not have a referendum in 2003, when Croatia applied for EU membership. We did not have a referendum in 2005, when Croatia officially opened negotiations with the EU. We did not even have a referendum in 2010, when our Constitution and the rules of the referendum were changed because of future EU membership. In other words, today we are in a situation where we can only choose what was already chosen throughout these stages. The question, repeated continuously by the Croatian government, ‘What is the alternative?’ already sounds like blackmail and is strangely reminiscent of the there-is-no-alternative-slogan made famous by Margaret Thatcher. And it is not by chance that we have a paradox here in the shape of an allegedly social-democratic government actually putting forward neoliberal reforms faster and more efficiently than the former conservative government. Already now – as a plan to ‘rescue’ the economy – this social democratic government is announcing gradual privatisations of highways and railways, the energy sector and even prisons.
At the same time we witness the bizarre situation where the government is trying to convince the people that Croatia has to join the EU because, firstly, we will no longer be part of the Balkans anymore, and secondly, we will finally be part of the West. Sometimes it is enough to take a look at the path of the previous candidates who are now full members of the club, to see what sort of mythology haunts each new member state. In his provoking book Eurosis – A critique of the new Eurocentrism, Slovenian sociologist Mitja Velikonja made an extensive discourse analysis starting from the observation that the infinitely reproduced mantras of the new Eurocentric meta discourse have caught on and became normalised within all spheres of social life: in politics, in the media, in mass culture, in advertising, in everyday conversations. In his own words: ‘Never during the one-party era of the uniformity of mind under Yugoslav totalitarianism did I see as many red communist stars as I saw yellow European stars in the spring of 2004, that is to say, under democracy.’15 In short, what we have is a kind of ‘virosis’, therefore the neologism ‘Eurosis’.
The pattern is always the same: according to the then Slovenian foreign minister, by joining the EU, Slovenia has come ‘one step closer to the European centre, European trends, European life, European prosperity, European dynamics and the like’. On the other hand, all things that are ‘backwards’, ‘bad’ or ‘out’ stand for – you can guess – the Balkans. Or, as one journalist said in the Spanish daily El Pais, ‘By joining the EU, Slovenia escaped the Balkan curse.’ But if we take a closer look, Europe is ‘Balkanised’ already, and, on the other hand, the Balkans is ‘Europeanised’ as well. This can be best explained
