Zoran and Sladjana Sluga's farm in Harmica, Croatia, will need expensive upgrades if Croatia joins the European Union.
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Published: January 17, 2012
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HARMICA, Croatia — Zoran Sluga has a small family farm here on the border with Slovenia, his 300-year-old barn filled with thousands of squawking chickens.
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But if Croatians vote to join the next Sunday, Mr. Sluga’s simple business will become a lot more complicated. The cages he keeps his hens in will not meet the group’s rules, requiring expensive upgrades. Italian egg producers, given access to Croatian markets, are likely to undercut his prices. Mr. Sluga believes that his very way of life is a stake. And for what? he asks.
“See what happened to Greece,” he said. “They got billions from the E.U. and it did not work out.”
Much has changed in the decade since Croatia first applied to join the European Union. What was once seen as a rich man’s club — which Croatia was eager to join — no longer looks like such a clear ticket to prosperity. Today’s European Union is mired in a crippling , which has pushed some of its members to the brink of bankruptcy and threatened its very essence.
Recent polls show that Croats are still likely to vote yes. Then, the 27 European Union countries are expected to ratify their membership and Croatia will become part of the group on July 1, 2013 — in all likelihood, the last new member for many years.
Srdjan Dumicic, the director of Ipsos Puls, a company that has conducted several polls on the subject in recent years, said that support had been dwindling in the past few weeks and could narrow, according to the latest poll that has not yet been published. Some Croatians joke, he said, that joining now is like arriving at the party at 2 a.m. Half the revelers are drunk. Half have gone home.
“It’s not the party it was at midnight,” Mr. Dumicic said.
Even the recently elected prime minister, Zoran Milanovic, talks about the prospect of European Union membership without much fervor.
Mr. Milanovic, a social democrat, says the pluses outweigh the minuses. He emphasizes the benefits of full access to a market of 500 million consumers and of gaining about $2 billion a year in development aid in the next couple of years, though future assistance is less certain.
And he sees progress in the overhaul of Croatia’s legal system, which the European Union insisted on.
But he also says that the events of recent years have proved that membership does not guarantee success and that Croatians need to be ready to work hard in a highly competitive environment.
“The working title could be ‘Curb That Enthusiasm,’ ” Mr. Milanovic said in an interview, slightly mangling the title of Larry David’s HBO series.
Critics go much further. They say that recent events have proved that Germany and France make the big decisions and that a country the size of Croatia, with a population of just 4.5 million, will have little say.
They worry also about joining just in time to pay the bill for Greece and other debt-laden countries. And they worry that Croatia, with a long Adriatic coastline, will find itself confronting a flood of immigrants, as Spain, Italy and Greece have.
“In the European Parliament, we would be 12 members out of more than 740; in the Council of Ministers, 7 votes out of more than 350,” said Marjan Bosnjak, secretary of the Council for Croatia, an association opposing European Union membership. “We will be a statistical error. Who will give a damn about what Croatians think?”
To get this far, Croatia, which could not escape the vicious fighting that broke out in the 1990s after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, had to subject itself to a European Union-style makeover. Once deeply corrupt, the government was forced to pass 350 new laws. No one knows how many documents were exchanged because the Croatians stopped counting after 150,000 pages. About 3,000 Croatians worked on the project, from diplomats to translators.
The reach of the European Union is often underestimated, as it tries to create an even playing field among its members. Take the egg business. No detail seems overlooked. The union’s rules say that the chicken cages must allow at least 750 square centimeters per hen and contain a nest, litter, perch and “clawing board.” These requirements are amusing to Mr. Sluga, the farmer. “The chickens have more rights than humans in the E.U.,” he joked.
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