Hrvoje Butković

The year 2023 marked the tenth anniversary of Croatia’s membership of the European Union, the last acceding country to the EU, and thus represents a fitting opportunity to explore the political, economic and social dimensions of this tremendous transformation. This book examines how Croatia has changed over the last ten years and looks at the driving forces as well as the obstacles on its post-accession path of Europeanisation. The book argues that the Croatian case has special importance given that the last decade of European integration has arguably been the most challenging one yet. It started with the Eurozone-wide sovereign debt crisis and ended with the economic hardship caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s aggression on Ukraine. Such demanding circumstances where agenda was often defined in an ad hoc way posed a huge test for Croatia’s governmental capacity. The book provides answers to the question of how successful Croatian policymakers were in dealing with the crises-related challanges and other needed adaptations. The book explores how EU membership has affected the design and implementation of selected national public policies, the functioning of governing institutions and patterns of cooperation between main social actors. Expert contributors analyse the impact of the EU membership in two principal areas: political and economic, with individual chapters addressing relevant topics. The book is intended for researchers, academics and students interested in these issues, as well as policymakers, entrepreneurs and lobbyists concerned with European integration.

The main question of this chapter is how the EU membership influenced the inner processes and relations between the executive, legislature and the judiciary branch in Croatia. The chapter argues that Croatia, like all previous acceding countries, experienced executive dominance during the accession process, which means that other branches of state power carried only formal authority in the process. After the EU accession, this changes as the legislature and judiciary start to assume more responsibility in the area of EU affairs. The complex process of formulating the Croatian government’s framework positions for the EU acts exemplifies this best. It empowers the national parliament to mandate the government to its framework position on the upcoming EU legislation. Another important post-accession instrument in the hands of the national legislature is political dialogues, which allow the parliament to communicate directly with the European Commission over the draft EU legislation. During the accession process, the national courts have been mainly unaware of their obligations concerning EU law. However, after Croatia entered the EU, its national courts became involved in the dynamic interplay between the national and the EU law.

The introductory chapter explains the motivation behind this book, which, through scholarly analysis, commemorates the tenth anniversary of Croatian EU membership. The historical overview of Croatia’s difficult path to the EU opens this introduction as a vital cornerstone upon which the country’s post-accession reality could be measured and analysed. This chapter further presents the broader context of Croatia’s decade-long EU membership, marked by many economic and political crises. Such context has been the most challenging yet for the EU, its member states and the European integration process. The separate part of this introduction is committed to a review of the theoretical concept of Europeanisation. The review shows that Europeanisation is a highly complex phenomenon which escapes unambiguous definitions. This introduction also overviews all other chapters, underlining their main highlights.

The article analyses the development of representative democracy in Croatia from its independence to today. During the 1990s, Croatia changed its electoral system several times and had a bicameral parliament. With the constitutional changes implemented in 2001, the legislative power was organized on a unicameral principle. At the same time, the previous semi-presidential system was replaced by a parliamentary one. These changes represent only the basic framework within which representative democracy in Croatia developed over time. An important milestone in this development was the introduction of preferential voting at the national elections in 2015, which allowed the voters to vote for a particular list and a specific candidate on that list. According to some, this improved the problematic state of inner-party democracy, although, for others, the reform was not far-reaching enough. Given that representative democracy does not function in a vacuum, the article also considers the impact of direct democracy on the functioning of representative democracy in Croatia. Referring to the Croatian experience, it argues that this complementary form of democracy had a positive impact on the quality of representative democracy in the country. Nevertheless, in the face of representative democracy in Croatia, many open questions still need to be addressed. The most important one is how to increase the turnout in the elections, which is still comparatively low and arguably related to the low trust in politics.

Ovaj članak analizira položaj osoba s odobrenom međunarodnom zaštitom, s ‎posebnim osvrtom na iskustvo njihova zapošljavanja, odnosno stjecanja ekonomske sigurnosti. Ekonomska sigurnost i neovisnost pretpostavka su i temelj ‎uspješne integracije osob...

This article explores the experiences of trade unions in Croatia and Poland with societal power resources as a source of trade union revitalisation in the post-2008 crisis period. In the context of limited structural, organisational and institutional power resources, Croatian and Polish trade unions attempted to build their societal power through the revitalisation strategies of coalition building and political action. The paper compares three similar, partially successful campaigns run in both countries, on pensions, Sunday trading and precarious work. Our findings show that gains in societal power alone cannot fully compensate for the erosion of conventional sources of trade union power. Such a configuration of power resources runs the danger of trade union demands being taken up by populist forces wanting to increase their own legitimacy, rather than furthering workers’ interests. Therefore, what starts as an attempt at union revitalisation based on the novel use of societal resources could easily end up as ‘captured innovation’ by populist forces.