Strategic Goals: Croatia Has the Packaging, It’s Time to Address the Content

They say that he who no longer has desires – because he has achieved what he wanted – is dead! An analogy would suggest that it is the same, or at least similar, with countries. From the first independent wartime steps, we have been chasing the holy grail – membership in developed groupings. From CEFTA through NATO and the EU to Schengen, the euro area, and soon the OECD. These are achievements that anyone, googling about that Croatia after winning third place in football or wondering in which remote place Cate Beckinsale is filming, will read on Wikipedia. Great! We succeeded! Unless we want to dig a little deeper. Then a large, rough line becomes visible, a chasm moreover, that separates two worlds – form and content.

Our form is excellent. We have successfully adorned ourselves with all external certifications, proudly displayed them like military decorations, and now… Well, what now? Because we are somewhat running out of organizations we need and/or must join. What is the new goal? What is our next desire? To become the production-technology-export leader of the region? To reach (perhaps even surpass) the average GDP of the Union? Agricultural independence? The return of the emigrants? There is no doubt that these are goals that create content, what we have not even begun to create since the first day of independence. Why? Well, because there is no one to do it.

As political consultant Karlo Jurak says, by achieving foreign policy goals, Croatia has practically become fully part of what is called ‘the West’ in international relations.

– In doing so, it has decided, figuratively speaking, to spoil someone’s joy a bit, to prefer to be ‘last in the city’ rather than ‘first in the village’. This phenomenon has already been quite described on an individual and population level, for example, in literature, in Croatian realism. This, of course, is not necessarily bad, but given that only the positive sides of this are mentioned, it is necessary to point out the negative or potentially negative ones, precisely so that we as a subject in international relations do not meet the fate of the city servant George as a prototype who mocks the village men.

In this sense, Croatia needs now more than ever to pay attention to what it is lagging behind in and how not to be the periphery of that ‘West’. Complete integration into the ‘West’ has been presented as a national interest, and there has been practically a consensus across the entire political spectrum on this. The negative side is that self-accepted semi-colonial position that cannot be rationalized by mere cultural phrases about ‘moving away from the Balkans’ and ‘belonging to the West’, or even more often, the mythical ‘Central Europe’. Instead of these phrases, we need to work on the content of the policies within which we belong, and that means maintaining and strengthening what we are stronger in, such as tourism, and working on what we are weak in or even devastated – Jurak emphasizes.

What do other interlocutors say, what is the goal to strive for after stringing together all the desired membership cards, read in the new digital and printed issue of Lider.