A Decade in the Making: Croatia Joins the European Union on July 1st. The story behind Croatia’s EU accession process and the impact of membership on the country’s economy. I: Country Profile and History of Accession Croatia, a small country of some 4 million people with a Mediterranean climate and long coast along the Adriatic, will become the European Union’s newest member on July 1st. It is one of the six nations which comprised the former Yugoslavia and will be the second former Yugoslav republic (after Slovenia) to join the EU.
Upon declaring its independence in 1991, Croatia immediately entered into a protracted conflict with Serb nationalists. While the violence eventually subsided, the 90s would nonetheless prove to be an arduous decade. It was under Prime Minister Ivo Sanader that Croatia began to align itself with Europe and experience real economic opening. A further precondition to EU membership was that Croatia cooperate fully with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. Source: The World Bank 2012. The Crisis of European Democracy. Amartya Sen: What Happened To Europe? ABOUT FIFTY YEARS AGO, in 1961, Jean-Paul Sartre complained about the state of Europe. “Europe is springing leaks everywhere,” he wrote. He went on to remark that “it simply is that in the past we made history and now history is being made of us.”
Sartre was undoubtedly too pessimistic. Many major achievements of great significance have occurred in the last half a century in Europe, since Sartre’s lament, including the emergence of the European Union, the reunification of Germany, the extension of democracy to Eastern Europe, the consolidation and improvement of national health services and of the welfare state, and the legalization and enforcement of some human rights. There is indeed a long-run historical contrast to which Sartre could have pointed. There is, of course, nothing particularly remarkable—or lamentable—in the changing role of the different regions of the world.
SO WHAT HAS GONE WRONG in Europe in recent years? The unification of Europe is an old dream. Europe can't cut and grow | Sony Kapoor and Peter Bofinger. Overspending by governments, we have been told, triggered this crisis. The cure thus lies in immediate austerity, hence last month's German-led push for a eurozone fiscal compact and the UK's pursuit of similar policies. But, as demonstrated by the experiences of Greece, Portugal and Spain, this course leads to biting, deep recessions and worsens public indebtedness. The IMF acknowledged as much last week. A focus on growth, not austerity, is the correct answer for Europe's ills. The case for "growth-friendly austerity" relies on the argument that public cuts are compensated for by consumers and businesses spending more, and with greater efficiency. However, the collapse of confidence wherein everyone expects the economy to worsen before (if) it gets better, along with excessive levels of private indebtedness, means that consumers and firms are busy repaying debt or building rainy-day funds, not spending and investing.
The Eurocratic assault on democracy | Bruno Waterfield. The European Union is currently straining every sinew in a campaign to stifle outbreaks of politics across Europe. For the EU oligarchs, democracy sucks. What if the Greeks - voting in elections this April - decide to tear up an austerity programme painstakingly hammered out by their betters in the EU and the IMF?
Imagine - and the memory of all those lost referendums still smarts among Eurocrats - if a country should decide it has had enough of the economic mismanagement and diktat that has characterised the Eurozone’s handling of the economic crisis. A spectre is indeed haunting the corridors of Brussels offices and it is real: a well-founded fear that voters will reject the ‘fiscal compacts’, ‘debt brakes’ and ‘golden rules’ aimed at securing the EU’s reign in de facto perpetuity. This fear of the electorate, of the popular will, was the underlying reason for the German chancellor’s appearance at the Élysée palace alongside the French president Nicolas Sarkozy this week. EU democracy in crisis: mired in a perfect storm or rebounding? As forecasters and media focus on how or whether the euro will survive in the year ahead, European democratic politics is also in deep crisis. A lethal mixture of EU weaknesses are coming home to roost: the failure over the years to effectively tackle the European Union's democratic deficit is now in a perilous interaction with the political and economic inadequacies built into the very design of the euro.
With the euro crisis taking off in the wake of the 2007 global economic and financial crisis, and with EU governments, dominated by the right, still under the sway of neoliberal ideology and the financial markets, European politics and society are being more profoundly challenged than for many decades. The mismanagement, both political and economic, of the euro crisis over the last two years is undermining both EU and national democratic legitimacy and vitality and exacerbating pre-existing weaknesses. The EU's shaky democratic legitimacy Legitimacy adrift What European future? The Myth of Europe - by Gareth Harding.
When the euro officially entered circulation at the stroke of midnight on Jan. 1, 2002, fireworks lit up the night sky across Europe to celebrate the scrapping of the French franc, German deutsche mark, Greek drachma, and a clutch of other ancient currencies. Brussels hosted an extravagant sound-and-light show, while Frankfurt unveiled a five-story statue of the freshly minted euro as a pop band belted out "With Open Arms (Euro World Song). " "I am convinced," European Central Bank President Wim Duisenberg declared, that the launch of euro coins and banknotes "will appear in the history books in all our countries and beyond as the start of a new era in Europe. " The early 2000s did feel like the European moment. Enlightened policy wonks on both sides of the Atlantic gushed about the glamorous new arrival on the global stage. First, there's the economic catastrophe.
Second, the economic crisis comes on top of the deepest political crisis the European Union has faced. How did we get here?