Upper hand

In our recent history in almost all wars and agreements you can find the words Croatia or Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Ottoman Empire’s demise started with the loss of the Balkan Peninsula. According to Professor Dr. İlber Ortaylı, Sultan Abdülhamit II’s biggest achievement is not losing an inch of Ottoman territory in all his 33 years on the throne. It is related to his cunning, manipulative diplomacy with the British, the Germans and the French.

Abdülhamit had left the steering of the land forces to the German, the naval forces to the British and the Gendamerie to the French. If you’ll remember the bloody war in the Balkans in the mid-1990s you’ll realize that the war could be stopped only after the largest fox interfered from the Transatlantic region.

Croatia suffered deeply from that war. They fought with all their might against the Serbs. Maybe that’s why today they are a small, but independent country on her way to gaining full accession to the European Union. Croatia’s capital, Zagreb, has a population of 800,000. The total population of Croatia is 4.5 million, 90 percent of it being Catholic Croatian. One percent is Bosnian Muslim. The value of Croatia’s total exports is $13 billion and imports $26 billion. Total trade with Turkey is only $0.5 billion. And the gross domestic product, or GDP is $50 billion.

Croatia’s strategic aim for years has been to be full members of the EU and NATO. Croatia is also putting much emphasis on regional cooperation. Has signed full membership agreement with NATO in July 2008 to become a member in 2009. Croatia started accession negotiations with the EU in 2005. Since then they opened 21 full chapters.

As members of the Turkey-EU Joint Parliamentary Committee members we have met almost all Croatian officials, including the president, in Zagreb for two days. Our impressions from these meetings are very interesting because both the Croatian opposition and the government are fully in consensus toward their strategic aims they want to reach. Croatia has a very strong and efficient chief negotiator and an accession council whose members are civic society groups, led by the opposition. To receive more maybe you will have to give some, but in the end you will be compensated. The diplomatic term for it is to use the upper hand. You can suddenly realize that your upper hand has come down and you quickly react to it by raising your other hand upper.

Croatia has a rising economic growth of 5 percent. The inflation rate in the country is as low as about 2.5 percent. But foreign debts has reached 80 percent of her GDP. Ninety-five percent of the banking system is in the hands of foreign investors. Nobody for the moment is able to predict how the global crisis will hit Croatia.

It will be useful to open a parenthesis at this point. It is apparent that Croatia has prepared herself impeccably for the negotiations with the EU. The chief Croatian negotiator is a professional journalist and diplomat who has worked in New York and Zagreb for many years. When Vladimir Brobnjak was telling us about the technicalities of the negotiations we realized that how difficult a way we had to treat with the EU. But the issue is about the will and the target. Does Turkey have the will to do it? This is not clear. It is not certain that the ones who oppose Turkey’s membership in Europe today will not change their minds tomorrow. Turkey, on her part, is doing the necessary reforms for herself.

"Several competitions are being held and you receive mathematical grades," says Neven, the speaker of the Croatian parliament, as Drobnjak had told us. "Moments are measured by centimeters. But from time to time there are no mathematical criteria during negotiations with the EU. Like it is in gymnastics and ice-skating competitions, referees are giving you certain grades. It is the rights you have got through these grades and the number of chapters opened that determine the fate of the negotiations. Afterward you have to get the ratification by the Commission, the Council and each member state. That’s why the process takes so long," he explained in detail.

The speed of Balkan countries achieving accession to Europe is very fast. We have to watch the region more closely.