Croatia and the EU: more questions than answers

Post for ShiftingGrounds
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As preparations gathered pace in Split for Sunday’s celebrations, marking Croatia’s membership of the EU, the city’s local radio stations provided a fitting soundtrack. ‘Go West’ by the Pet Shop Boys seemed to play almost on loop throughout the day, filtering out of nearly every restaurant or coffee shop you walked by.

The country’s newspapers had been counting down the days. Despite public scepticism, there is a sense at least that Croatia has taken up its rightful place. The journalist Jenine di Giovanni wrote in her 2004 book on the Balkans:

“…this colourful image [of the Balkans] was exactly the sort that the Croats did not want to promote. They were not really Balkan people; they often told you they were Southern Austrians. The Croat denial fostered a sense of mixed identity in Zagreb. The people dressed in Armani but lived in apartments without central heating. They carried the latest Nokia phones but had no money in their bank account…

Their biggest grievance was belonging to a Balkan group they did not want to be part of. They saw themselves as a Western democracy.”

Yet identity and pride aside, it’s hard not to wonder what question the country’s EU membership is the answer to – not least when considering the way its political class has prioritised it over the last ten years (hence much grievance from them, too, on the extensive vetting the European Commission subjected Croatia to).

True, it – or rather the prospect of it – has been good for the region’s fragile peace, helping to hold the Dayton settlement in place. The scale and horror of Serb atrocities in Bosnia and Herzegovina often obscure Croatia’s own crimes in the same country just two decades ago. It was the Zagreb government, after all, who connived with Bosnian-Croat forces to turn brutally on their Bosniak allies, aiming to tear off parts of Bosnia for their own, in pursuit of a lesser but still stark Croatian imitation of Milosovic’s expansionism.

Here Brussels has dangled EU membership effectively. It has used it to ensure Croatia properly complies with the International Criminal Court’s investigation into war crimes during the 90′s. The same incentive has also played a role in dissuading Zagreb from resuming support for still restless Bosnian-Croat secessionists.

But even still, in the long term it’s far from clear that the Bosnian question is totally settled. Leaders in Bosnia’s Republic Srpska – the Serb state within a state created at Daytan – have made obvious their own desire to secede. One of the main barriers to this at present is the lack of support they’re likely to enjoy from Belgrade, who are also on their best behaviour under promise of EU membership.

However, once this promise becomes a reality and the incentive disappears, that could easily change. In the ensuing melee, who knows how the Croats – now a member not a prospective one – would react. They may again see a opportunity to claim what isn’t theirs, especially given Bosnian-Croats have a (not insignificant) vote in Croatian elections. This is unlikely under the current SDP government, who don’t rely on those votes, but could be feasible if the centre-right HDZ returned. Certainly far right Croatian nationalism hasn’t totally gone away, as the uncomfortable amount of fascist graffiti scrawled across Split can attest to.

More immediately, however, there’s the prospects for the Croatian economy. Croatia’s bid for EU membership was kick started 12 years ago, when Western free-market capitalism – which post-Maastricht the EU has become the standard bearer for – was in its pomp. Entry to the EU represents in many ways the completion of long efforts by Croatia’s political elites to ‘harmonise’ the country’s economy with European orthodoxy.

Croatia’s economy today is thus completely deindustrialised (albeit this was aided by war damage); it is in large part a service sector economy, dependent on tourism and retail – which struggles to provide adequately for a lot of the country. Most of its growth in the early 2000′s was driven by consumer credit.

Sadly, between Croatia’s application and accession, the flaws of that model have been horribly exposed across Europe. Its economy is consequently stuck in our recession; at 20%, Croatian unemployment is worse only in Greece and Spain in EU terms (youth unemployment is over 50%). Its banks, largely foreign owned and piled high with European debt, are vulnerable. Household debt has shot up, as has government debt.

The dichotomy that di Giovanni wrote about has seemingly continued – though new shopping complexes have continued popping up across Croatia’s cities, absolute poverty has almost doubled over the last decade.

Despite the vague hopes of Croatia’s President, Ivo Josipović, it is hard to see how formal acceptance into the European club helps all this. Indeed in at least one sense it’s made it worse: one of the ugliest components of Croatia’s EU ‘preparations’ was the sight of Brussels forcing the privatisation of the country’s shipyards, which still make up a sizeable chunk of Croatia’s exports. In Split alone – across town from the palm-treed, tourist friendly promenade that hosted Sunday’s celebrations – this has seen over 1,000 people lose their jobs. The jobs of the remaining 2,000 workers hang in the balance, but if the private company which now owns the yard do take them back on, many will be on a part time or temporary contracts.

All of which leaves you with the feeling that a great country has been rather led astray. Croatia stumbles into the EU mired in recession, with falling living standards, and in desperate need of a new model of economic growth. The Commission needn’t have worried; it will fit in all too well.

The left must find its voice on Syria

Piece for Shifting Grounds

The left must find its voice on Syria

On 26 March 1999, Russia and China tabled a UN Security Council resolution condemning the US-UK led intervention in Kosovo, which had been launched following the escalating massacre and ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians by Serb forces.

The resolution denounced NATO action as a flagrant breach of sovereignty and demanded its cessation. In an important moment, the motion was resoundingly defeated. By 12 votes to 3, Western and non-Western states, many of whom were not natural allies of the US, lined up against it and backed the war. Summing up the mood, the Dutch representative said:

“Today we regard it as a generally accepted rule of international law that no sovereign state has the right to terrorise its own citizens…Times have changed, and they will not change back…”

This consensus did not emerge out of nowhere. It was a norm built up throughout a decade that counted the costs of inaction in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, and particularly in Bosnia at Srebrenica. But this was not some neo-con project. The idea that, in very limited circumstances and by very strict criteria, intervention could be justified to prevent an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe was pioneered by thinkers on the centre left, where it enjoyed broad support.

Thirteen years on, Dutch pronouncements look horribly premature. Bashar Al-Assad’s militias rampage through Syria, shelling and slaughtering his own people en masse – gouging out the eyes of children while they execute them, one by one – to see that his dictatorship retains power. As UN monitors withdraw, Russia and China shield the regime from any meaningful recourse, just as with Kosovo – except this time there’s little or no will to defy them. Times have changed back.

What is striking though is how relatively little we on the mainstream left have to say about all this. I am not for a second accusing people of not caring about events. But there is little of the pressure on William Hague to help find a solution that Robin Cook or Tony Blair felt, and which played its role in the decision to confront Milosevic. There is instead a sense of paralysis, a fatalism that nothing can be done. If this silence is ever broken, it’s usually to warn of the perils of action, rather than inaction.

But it doesn’t necessarily have to be like this. That’s not to argue that the model used in the Balkans or Libya will work in Syria. Ill-judged actions could easily make things even worse; each case is different with its own complexities, and should be treated as such. But there remains a host of at least plausible options far short of occupation or even air-strikes which could help make a horrendous situation in Syria a bit less so, and stem the bloodshed. One is a no-fly zone. Another, the most comprehensive, is a proposal for humanitarian safe havens (‘No Kill Zones’) put forward by Anne-Marie Slaughter in the US (here and here). These, as she outlines, could be defensively patrolled for instance by the Free Syrian Army, with the conditional logistical support of Arab League states, Turkey and the West.

Such plans may not in the end stand the test of scrutiny, though they have so far, and something like them is favoured by the French. But at the moment they are not even being countenanced by those on the centre-left in the UK; they are not even being discussed, let alone pushed for. Instead most seem to have succumbed to the gloomy assumption – until now the preserve of the far left – that all and any action involving Western power is reducible to an act of imperialism that can only end in disaster. If humanitarian intervention ever appears in our discourse, it’s rarely without inverted commas and a sneer.

What lies behind all of this, of course, is Iraq. The disastrous invasion and occupation has made it easy to tar all Western intervention with the same brush (helped further by proponents of war with Saddam cynically appropriating humanitarian language after initial rationales had been exposed). One opened the door to the other, so the argument goes. The histories of the conflicts in Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone and lately Libya are constantly being flimsily re-written to fit this neat worldview.

But whatever you think of those wars, it is possible and necessary to separate them out from Iraq and Afghanistan – or to support one but not the other. The former were wildly different interventions, prosecuted in totally different circumstance and for totally different reasons. Iraq met few of the criteria set out under R2P, for instance, or even Blair’s own Chicago speech. Similarly, there was no oil in Pristina, and very little geo-strategic benefit to Benghazi. Life is more complex than that.

More to the point, the interventions of the mid-to-late 90s and in Libya actually worked. They were enormously imperfect, complex and bloody (and in the case of Bosnia, belated), and occasionally horrible mistakes were made in the course of them. But they ultimately helped end conflicts which at one point had promised butchery, ethnic cleansing and human misery on an infinitely worse scale. Western influence and power remains a very blunt object indeed, and people across the left are right to treat it with suspicion. It will always be selective, and of course is sometimes the author of brute realpolitic. But occasionally, it can be pressed into engineering the least worst outcome.

Again, what is possible in Syria is likely very different to before. But progressives urgently need to address this mental block to any outside action at all, which seems to have set in among many of us, because at the moment it’s leaving an eerie silence in the face of immense brutality and suffering. The situation is not simple, and as Rory Stewart has said, “we do not have a moral obligation to do what cannot be done”. But we do have a moral obligation to open our minds, and at least arrive at that conclusion honestly.

Success for Hollande could change the terms of the debate

Piece for Shifting Grounds blog



It’s fair to say that the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis has not been kind to the left. A favourite talking point of those writing obituaries for social democracy is that right-of-centre governments have come to dominate the continent, holding power in 22 of 27 EU countries. So as the French presidential election reaches its crescendo this week, the prospect of an Hollande presidency could prove a decisive moment in recent history.

For one thing, if Hollande makes it to the Elysee he will have been propelled there by a revival of the far left. The Left Front, led by Jean-Luc Melenchon, has assumed a place and importance in this election that must seem a distant dream to their UK counterparts. Working as a coherent counter-veiling force to Sarkozy and Le Pen, they have dragged the debate leftwards and re-connected with working class voters long since thought lost to apathy or worse, the Front National. Here we should at least allow ourselves optimism at what the broad left can achieve with a few charismatic or competent leaders, and with Pythonesque splits and sectarianism left in the past. (Not losing sight of the shared enemy, Melenchon has long urged his voters to transfer to Hollande in the second round.)

But we kid ourselves if we think what we are seeing in itself represents a ‘uniform swing’ to the left acrossEurope. The French system is distinct, and the left there work on far more fertile territory than in other states: France’s political discourse (if not electoral history) traditionally leans their way. What is of more importance is if Hollande both wins and is able to implement his policy platform in the face of vested interests.

The austerity economics of the past few years has brought into focus a phenomenon that’s defined the past three decades – that is, economic policy (and debate) largely framed by the prevailing wisdom among financial elites. The most potent embodiment of this in recent times has been the almighty position assumed by the international bond markets. Although treated as neutral, these have demanded a highly prescriptive form of right-wing economics in exchange for low interest rates – with particular focus on deep spending cuts and tax rises (on all but the rich) as the best means to reduce debt, deficits and increase growth. Any alternative is deemed ‘unworkable’ or ‘unrealistic’ at best, and haunted by the threat of punishment. This trumping of sovereign governments of whatever stripe, mostly derived from unchecked de-regulation and globalisation, forms part of what Zygmunt Bauman has called a ‘disconnect between power and politics’.

Hollande at least poses a challenge to this order. His manifesto proposes deficit reduction via stimulus and growth, and represents the first coherent alternative to austerity inEuropesince the collapse of Lehmans. It promises to boost state spending by €20 billion over 5 years, create 60,000 new teaching posts, fund new jobs for the young unemployed and invest in social housing. Alongside this is a new 75% tax on incomes over €1 million, taxes on banks and financial transactions, a ban on stock options and the promise of significant banking reform. Significantly, Hollande has also pledged to re-negotiate the EU fiscal treaty to give greater emphasis to growth over cuts, and to push for a more active role for the ECB.

While this is by no means revolutionary, it is far outside what is deemed acceptable in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Sensing the threat, Hollande’s opponents at home and abroad have begun the scaremongering that will be familiar to anyone who’s followed the economic debate in the UK. Openly inviting speculation, Sarkozy has said the Hollande’s plan will turn France into a ‘new Greece’, while transnational financial ‘leaders’ have been summoned to warn of a ‘bloodbath’ in the markets – a ‘new wave of instability’ – should voters vote the wrong way, or Hollande have the cheek to act on his mandate. Echoing this, The Economist – which has long viewed the belligerence of France’s social model as a sort of childish impudence defying ‘inevitable’ liberalisation – has spent much time fretting that candidates ‘may actually mean what they say’! Deep spending cuts are presented as unavoidable, and a country whose underlying economic position is sound has suddenly been talked up to be on the brink of collapse.

Whether Hollande, if victorious, can face down such threats and intimidation and push ahead with his programme will tell us a great deal about politics in 2012. It will give us a clear picture of where the balance of power really lies between markets and democracy, and the real scope for change. If he avoids Mitterrand’s fate, and France emerges unscathed, he may help break the hoodoo that market reprisal has thus far held over Europe’s centre-left parties and their electorate, particularly in the UK. If no ‘bloodbath’ is forthcoming, and austerity’s ‘leading lights’ are exposed to have cried wolf over the French Socialists, then centre-left parties will have the beacon of a bold, workable alternative at the heart of Europe.

Of course, there is no guarantee that Hollande will stay the course – he is, ultimately, a pragmatist – nor that he will successfully pursue his argument at an EU level. So far, though, he has shown no signs of back-tracking. No doubt the resurgence of the far left, whose presence at least partially accounts for the scale of Hollande’s manifesto, helps to explain this – and should they remain united, they may yet have a key role to play in holding his feet to the fire.

Either way, the stakes are huge. Mark Fisher has defined the ‘No Alternative’ fatalism that has underpinned the neo-liberal era as ‘capitalist realism’. In his seminal book on the subject, he writes:

"The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility."

Francois Hollande is no messiah, and his platform is no panacea, but it may yet prove to be that tear in the curtain that social democracy has so long been waiting for.