engleski

The Importance of Being Central European: Traces of Imperial Border(s) in Croatian Accession to the EU

Although inherent to some of the seminal theoretical concepts which articulated the “patterns of representation” of and in the Balkan region, the nature of national, regional, cultural and civilizational borders was not the central point of interest in the work of authors such as Milica Bakić-Hayden or Maria Todorova in the 1990s. As these concepts were reused and reinterpreted in the era of the so-called Eastern enlargement of the EU, in the 2000s, a number of authors have attempted to demonstrate that the EU’s application of the strict conditionality policy and the concurrent shifting of the Schengen border zone, was discursively dominated by the notion of Eastern Europe as continent’s periphery, in which each country envisages its own Eastern borders as “Europe’s last outpost.” This paper will draw upon the examples from my research on the social perception of the EU in Croatia to demonstrate how the fuzzy and porous cultural and civilizational borders of “Central Europe” and “Balkan” may be interpreted as tidemarks whose distinctive traces – such are proofs of Austro- Hungarian legacy – reappear and resume their importance in the changed political context.

European Union; Croatian accession process; Central Europe; Balkan

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