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Mental Maps on the Negotiating Table: Symbolic Geographies in Croatian Accession to the European Union

Some of the seminal concepts which examined the “patterns of representation” in and of the Balkan region within the “critique of Balkanism” in the 1990s were once again used and interpreted in the following decade within the body of literature that critically approached the era of the two enlargements of the European Union. A number of authors attempted to examine the EU’s application of the conditionality policy in relation to the discourses which perpetuated various “gradations of Europeanness”, but also in relation to the national myths of many East- Central European countries, according to which their own eastern border is envisaged as Europe’s “last outpost”. Even today, when many of the formerly “Eastern European” countries have been EU members for more than a decade, the discursive threads related to the symbolic power relations retain their relevance. This paper will draw upon the examples from research performed in the pre-accession period in Croatia in order to demonstrate how the fuzzy and porous cultural and civilizational borders of Central Europe and the Balkans are envisaged and deployed in national, regional and continental symbolic geographies. It will also engage with the metaphor of “tidemarks” (Green), which attempts to include both space and historical time in the analysis of the border-related practices.

symbolic geography ; European Union ; Croatian accession process ; Central Europe ; the Balkan

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