When in Zagreb you are reminded of a European culture and history that for decades was hidden behind the Iron Curtain and you are reminded of the very special regime in Yugoslavia that the communist leader Tito formed. It is the old Europe, and Churchill defined it so extremely well: ”From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. ”
Zagreb was one of them, but at the time of Churchill’s famous Fulton-speech the city was also hidden behind the existence of the Yugoslav republic and the capital he mentioned was Belgrade. In combination with a civil war full of brutality and atrocities that changed the direction of the Croat society for at least a decade, the emergence of Croatia as a modern society was slowed down.
I am thinking about this as I am leaving Zagreb after a two days meeting with our Joint Parliamentary Committee, overseeing the negotiation process. The Croat society is today a fundamentally different society from the one during decades under communist leadership but also from the society that emerged after the brutalities after the civil war.
It is a triumph of the enlargement process and of a tough negotiation process, leading to a successful fight against the organized crime that followed suit after the war, the corruption that became customary during socialism and the times of war and the need to deal with all breaches against international law. The reforms and the improvements are only in the language of politics on behalf of the European Union.
The meaning of becoming a member of European Union is not to become a member of a club but to become a member of framework of rule of law, market economy, stable democracy and personal freedom. In order to become part of such a society you need to secure you are such a society. In real life the reforms are making Croatia a better society for its citizens.
When we discuss all the different chapters that the negotiations are structured around, when we discuss the independence of the judiciary or the competition issues regarding ship yards it is not about enlarging the club but enlarging rule of law and market economy to Croatia.
And when I am jogging around in Zagreb in the morning before the JPC it strikes me that this very European city was not very long ago a part of a region in war, where people committed war crimes to each other and used brutal military force to defeat those who were not like you. And the evil heritage of this time survived into the late 90-ies and influenced people and society. Protecting wartime criminals, the negligence of the past, the corruption and the organized crime, all of it hindered modernisation and development. The forces of the past could reign at the cost of the hopes and visions of the future.
EU is not Brussels, the Parliament, the Commission or the Council – not even the Lisbon treaty. The European Union is the new society we can see emerging, in Zagreb and all over Europe.
Our institutions and our meetings are only instruments for establishing an open society where people can fulfil their hopes, study independent of borders, work wherever they want, travel to meet their Europe in another country, invest and be entrepreneurs. It is the human life in Zagreb and all other ancient capitals behind all the curtains that have hindered Europeans to live a peaceful and prosperous life that is the European Union.
And with Croatia soon becoming the 28th member state we will be over-bridging still another curtain that has divided people on the Balkan for such a long time, because the membership of Croatia is a signal of momentum to an increased regional cooperation and new steps of enlargement that will change this haunted part of Europe.
That new Balkan is much more the reality of EU than Brussels. And so is daily life in Stettin, Trieste, Copenhagen, Dublin, Lisbon as well as all the meetings between people that open borders have turned into normality. The meetings we had between parliamentarians from European Parliament and the Sabor is only one example of that.