Croatia Joins European Union

Croatia became the 28th member of the European Union on Monday, a joyous moment for the small, predominantly Catholic country about 20 years after it won independence in the bloody wars of the Balkans.

With Europe roiled by financial crisis, Croatia’s accession offers a rare moment of satisfaction for the union, underlining how a country’s desire to join the world’s biggest trading bloc can push it to make difficult economic and political changes.

Since the end of the cold war, the European bloc’s soft power, its ability to press for concessions from countries that want to join, has been a powerful foreign policy tool and an alternative to American military might. In the case of Croatia, the incentive of joining the union pushed it to revamp a statist post-Communist economy, pass more than 350 new laws and arrest more than a dozen Croatian and Bosnian-Croat war criminals.

In return, Croatia stands to benefit from gaining access to a market of 500 million consumers as well as about $18 billion in financing earmarked for the country from 2014 to 2020.

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