Anti-corruption Policy in Croatia: Benchmark for EU Accession

In this article the author analyses the anti-corruption policy in Croatia as part of a wider awareness-rising process in transition countries. After the collapse of Communism, corruption spread quickly in post-Communist countries as a result of exogenous factors such as the export of corruption by the most developed countries seeking to find new markets, and endogenous factors such as hasty privatization and the creation of new political elites caught in the web of various conflicts of interest. In Croatia the situation was exacerbated by the war itself and war speculations and profiteering, followed by a corruptive privatization and lack of anti-corruption standards in the political culture of the country. Croatia had to adopt, on its way to European Union membership, a set of concrete measures countering the spreading of political corruption throughout the society. An important role was, thus, played by European Union conditionality requesting an integral approach to the pathological phenomenon of corruption. The author argues that such an integral approach has not yet been achieved due to the reduction of political corruption mostly to bribe and graft, while more sophisticated forms of political corruption have not been tackled yet, such as party clientelism, cronyism, electoral fraud and trading in influence. Therefore the author invokes the results of a comprehensive approach to political corruption as done by contemporary political science in the world, and advocates the formulation of a comprehensive anti-corruption code that would eliminate the dispersion of anti-corruptive legislation in numerous acts and redundancy that obfuscate the action of political actors in combating corruption. Here the role of the European Union is tantamount because it sets very tough standards based on a wide investigation of political corruption in Croatia at all levels, especially in the highest echalons of political life. An anti-corruption strategy as well as concrete action plans in combating corruption became part of the benchmarks, a third generation conditionality standards elaborated by the EU, and Croatia had to comply to them and build the society's capacity to deal with political corruption in a more efficient way, thus eliminating ambiguity and hesitancy that could harm the political actors in power.