In some non-Egypt news from a few days ago, Croatia formally acceded to the EU. Croatia is the second former Yugoslav Republic (after Slovenia) to join the EU. It is unlikely to be joined by its Southern neighbors in the near future, as they are all still in fairly early stages of the membership process. While there is much debate about the appropriateness of extending EU membership to geographically peripheral countries like Turkey and Ukraine, most folks accept the inevitability of bringing the Western Balkans into the group, especially since with the accession of Bulgaria, they are not entirely surrounded by EU states.
But there’s something curious about this from Croatia’s perspective. After all, the EU is a flailing economic disaster these days. Why would you want to tie yourself into that?
Well the short answer is that Croatia, like any non-EU European state, is already hostage to the EU’s economic conditions and policy. That’s proximity for you.
The longer answer is that we have lost sight of the original purpose of the EU (and the integration process in general). We are prone to see it as an organization for economic convenience and benefit. So when those benefits seem scarce, the motivation for being in the EU seem puny as well. This is usually how we analyze Norway remaining outside the EU, even as the rest of Scandinavia joined up.
But when the integration process was first dreamed up, in the wretched bombed out Europe of the late 1940s, economics wasn’t exactly top of mind. The major goals of integration were as follows:
- Strengthen European cooperation to help avoid the tensions that could lead to another war. By this I really mean “Keep the Germans in check”. Washington may have been paranoid about the USSR from step 1, but as far as most Europeans were concerned in the first decade of peace, the real threat to Peace in Europe was most definitely still the prospect of a revanchist Germany.
- Help organize mutual defense of the West against the USSR. A key subgoal here being to reduce the likelihood that the Red Army would try to grab a few politically isolated pieces of the West.
- Create a Western European bloc large enough to establish some political independence from the US.
- Help France, which believed it would dominate the project, maintain its global power status.
Now the Soviet Union being dead, the US being no longer particularly inclined to micromanage Western Europe, and the threat of another intra-Europe great war having dimmed (4. never really went away though), the integration project’s ongoing rationale has shifted to economics.
But while Western Europe is now far distant from the threat of war and political disorder, the rest of the continent is not. The allure of economic benefits were not the main reason why the old Warsaw Pact countries joined the EU a decade ago. Instead it was largely based on their desire to be knitted into a system they hoped would provide them greater security, a defense against Russia, and support for their political institutions.
The same is true of the former Yugoslav republics. For them war is still a recent memory, the lived experience of a substantial majority of the population.
For Croatia, the EU, in all its austerity-mad glory, still promises Peace.