Croatia: From isolation to EU membership

Vesna Pusic, Croatia's foreign minister, is fond of pointing out that when Croatia joins the European Union on 1 July, 2013 the accession process will have taken 12 years and four months. The EU that Croatia will join is not the same as the one it was at the beginning of the process. But Croatia, too, is a very different place from the one it was before. "We used the process to build our own institutions and stabilise our state," says Ms Pusic. Ms Pusic is right, but for many Croats her words seem rather abstract. Croatia's economy is in recession effectively for the fifth year. Unemployment is rising: it was 13.4% in 2008 and this year is expected to hit 20.4%. Its population is ageing and shrinking. In 1991 Croatia's population was 4.7 million. Now it is less than 4.3 million, and that is not just because so many of Croatia's Serbs left in the 1990s.
 Croats are angry. They distrust their leaders and see a small number of people who made fortunes over the last two decades while life has become increasingly tough for ordinary people.
 By Tim Judah / BBC News /continue