The 28th member state

Yesterday Croatia became the 28th member state of the European Union (EU). From the historical point of view, the new membership confirms the continuing existence of a “demand for Europe” — a cheering factor for the sagging spirits of an EU public mired in recession and growing unemployment. Everything seems to indicate that there is more faith in the EU outside its borders than within them.

Croatia’s entry has taken place no fewer than ten years after it applied for membership. Such a long period of preparation was intended to ensure that the union’s second Balkan member, after Slovenia, would be thoroughly equipped to shoulder the costs of economic integration into the wider, more dynamic framework of the EU.

For the Union that Croatia now joins, this eighth operation in its eastward enlargement does not involve economic problems, given the limited size of the economy to be absorbed. It does, however, constitute something of a political challenge: that of adapting its institutional fabric to a new member.

Meanwhile, the European Council last week decided to begin membership negotiations with Serbia, which has diluted its authoritarian attitudes concerning Kosovo, and also to begin discussion with this new state, with a view to its joining the EU-Balkans Stabilization and Association Agreement.

These changes make it advisable that before any additional EU membership process is brought to a conclusion, more serious consideration should be given to the applicant state’s real degree of democratic maturity, which ought to be a great deal higher than that exhibited — now that they are already inside the Union — by Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.

It is not true that democratic or economic deficiencies in EU member states are a problem only in the newly joined states of Eastern Europe. Witness, for example, the distortions of democratic rules and procedures in Italy, brought about by Berlusconi, or the sudden xenophobic outbreaks in France and the United Kingdom. But it is true that the institutional weaknesses of the new members, whether in the constitutional dimension, in the judicial system or in the treatment of certain minorities, tend to be deeper and more hardened. And the Union should also give serious consideration to the effects of enlargement on the functionality of its own institutions, so as to increase it.

The prospect of joining the EU operates in candidate states as an incentive to political liberalization and economic modernization, as has been evident in the case of Turkey, in a double sense: the closer to the EU, the greater progress; the further from it, the greater regression. But Europe must also think of its own interests. And the first of these, because otherwise the EU could well disappear, is the avoidance of complication in its decision-making processes. Any further enlargement must be accompanied, or preceded, by the suppression of the requirement of unanimity in votes taken on key issues, given that the right of veto paralyzes the decisions of a club with so many members.