Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović is a Croatian politician and diplomat who served as president of Croatia from 2015 to 2020. She was the first woman and the youngest person to assume the presidency. Before that position, Grabar-Kitarović held a number of governmental and diplomatic posts. She was minister of European Affairs from 2003 to 2005, and minister of Foreign Affairs and European Integration from 2005 to 2008, then Croatian ambassador to the United States from 2008 to 2011, and assistant secretary-general for public diplomacy at NATO from 2011 to 2014. She was a member of the conservative Croatian Democratic Union party from 1993 to 2015, and in 2020, she was elected as a member of the International Olympic Committee.
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You were Minister of Foreign Affairs and Minister of European Integration when your country started accession negotiations with the EU and NATO in 2005. Historic times they were.
Well, with NATO, it was a bit of a simpler process in terms of negotiations. You basically fulfilled the criteria; you had to commit to certain elements that are restructuring your forces in order to be NATO compatible, interoperable, and all of those aspects. But that was a very tough period for Croatia, because in addition to all the criteria that Hungary and other countries of the fifth accession had to fulfil, we also had issues from our own neighbourhood, the vestiges of war, and the cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. However, when we resolved that, we were fortunate that a number of countries were working with us, and that they really trusted us. I have always said that I count Hungary as one of our best neighbours, a country that has stood by us from the very beginning, even taking in people from occupied parts of Croatia who were running for their lives, carrying basic belongings, and Hungary would take them in without any questions. And Hungary supported us throughout our war of independence, but also throughout the process of European integration, which was hard and demanding. And I had the honour of being the leader of the state delegation, so I was the one who read our opening positions and started negotiations on Croatia’s accession.
And finally, Croatia joined NATO in 2009 and the European Union in 2013. Are the Croatians, after 13 years, satisfied with the status of the EU, the status of Croatia in this entity?
It’s a very hard question to answer, because we Croatians are complicated people. We are never happy…
I think we are the same.
…which is not bad altogether, because that keeps the human race going when you constantly want more, and so you start working towards creating better circumstances. I think, overall, people are satisfied. A lot of them will not admit it, because we like to complain. I think we suffer from almost chronic self-criticism.
‘I count Hungary as one of our best neighbours, a country that has stood by us from the very beginning’
The only exception is my son, who is also a US citizen, because he was born in the US, but he says that Croatia is absolutely the best country to live in, and then he’s going to stay in Croatia for the rest of his life. This is what I have been promoting for young people: to use the opportunities of the European Union to go and work and study and learn, but to come back to Croatia, ultimately enriched with that experience, and then translate it into our own society, to be able to remodel it and to modernize it. Not in terms of doing away with tradition, but in terms of bringing different ways of thinking, of being a bit more ambitious than we have been. We are used to being part of different empires and state structures, and we always look to certain other capitals like our masters. You know, in Croatia, people say: ‘Oh, Brussels will take the decision.’ But we are Brussels now. Because we’re part of the 27.
Is that your perception?
That is my perception. For instance, we are in the Eurozone, which has brought so many economic issues and inflation, compounded by all of these disturbances in the international environment, from Covid to the war in Ukraine, or to the most recent crisis in the Gulf, with the prices of fuel surging. However, it has made our lives so much simpler. It became better gradually and better organized. I won’t dare say that people have a better life now, because it depends really on every single individual how they define their life, but from the trends that I have seen, I think it is better for us to be part of that larger market. But we need to preserve the national identity and the voice of every single country. So that means not a multi-layered, multi-tier Europe of countries that have more rights than others. We need to preserve our sovereignty, which is shared in certain areas but is not given up on, and at the same time, contributes to the creation of that common European identity. Because Europe is not just about Western Europe, it’s all of us. We all make Europe.
Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović speaks at the Danube Institute’s conference in Budapest. PHOTO: Tamás Gyurkovits/Hungarian Conservative
Are Croatians afraid of further taking away of member state powers and Brussels moving towards federalism?
I think we can still deal with it. I think that debate is not always structured and not always beneficial. I’m concerned about the lack of leadership. I think we need stronger, better leadership that is focused on the present and on the future, and that actually knows about life. And I think the fears in Croatia about the European Union swallowing us and destroying our national identity were actually bigger before we joined. And that was the basis of the programme of those extreme Eurosceptics who were pulling out things like some of the customs in Croatia, for instance, the farmer’s cheese that is sold in the markets. Less than 1 per cent of the people in Croatia go to the market to buy farmer’s cheese. But nevertheless, it became an issue of national survival, because some were saying: ‘Oh, we won’t be allowed to produce that’—which was not true. We just had to stick to the proper hygiene requirements, which was a good thing. And so those were all aspects that people were scared about, but I think that everybody is being reassured now.
‘Because Europe is not just about Western Europe, it’s all of us. We all make Europe’
How do you envision the European Union in ten years’ time? Can it become a federalist state?
No, I don’t think it’s going to become a federal state any time soon. I don’t think that even the big countries would want a federalization of Europe. But one criticism: in 2015, Andrzej Duda, the President of Poland at the time, and I started together an initiative called the Three Seas Initiative. We started with the idea of connecting the Baltic and the Adriatic, and later also the Black Sea, so that we connect the Central European space. There was so much suspicion that I had to do a lot of explaining. We were told that we were building a Trojan horse in Europe, that we were American agents, and that this was something that was anti-Russian. It was not. We were trying to find a vehicle that would strengthen Central Europe. Because you have to admit that there are so many differences between our part of Europe and those countries that have been member states for much longer, and also the mental division of East and West. So, our initiative was aimed at strengthening Central Europe as the backbone of European security and cohesion, and it wasn’t about breaking Europe. On the other hand, it was actually about bringing better lives in our own countries that could match the circumstances in these other countries. This is one of the reasons that our young people are leaving for better opportunities and bigger salaries. And nowadays, a lot of people who left Croatia realize that back home, they can perhaps have a better quality of life with much less money than they were making, because they have the infrastructure, the family support, the safety net of the social system, the communities…
The cultural roots.
…the cultural roots. There’s always some kind of institution that will take them in, that will feed them, that will clothe them. So, in Zagreb, in contrast to Brussels, you will not find people sleeping in the streets or anywhere in Croatia. Safety and quality of life—this is what we have to preserve. Safety and stability—this is what distinguishes us from some other parts of Europe.
‘We need to preserve the national identity and the voice of every single country’
And it is connected to the migration issue. What is the stance of Croatia on this? Because, as we mentioned, there was a turbulent time in your presidency, the migration crisis.
I can tell you about my experience in 2015 and 2016. I was very upset and actually misunderstood at the time. And I believe that, actually, your Prime Minister was misunderstood as well. I was not anti-migration, because migration is something that happens and has been part of human history forever. I was against chaos. I was against hypocrisy. I was against us actually supporting human trafficking. Why? Because we were letting everybody in. And I have to refer to Croatia’s past. During our war of independence, there were a lot of displaced persons, and then later refugees from Bosnia and Herzegovina who were taken in by the country, and they were either staying with families or in hotels or hostels; we never created refugee camps. At one point, the number of displaced persons and refugees amounted to one quarter of Croatia’s population, and we did that mostly on our own, from our own public and government finances, so we carried the bulk of that burden on our own, and we know about refugees.
Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović PHOTO: Tamás Gyurkovits/Hungarian Conservative
And then, as president, I just went to the border to see those refugees at the time. I went to Malta, North Macedonia and other places. And what did I see? I saw mostly young men, 80–85 per cent of them were young men, and most of them claimed they had no IDs whatsoever. They were waiting orderly on the border, but not at an official border crossing that had Schengen facilities for refugees, but several kilometres away at an illegal border crossing. Why? You start asking questions: ‘What is the intention?’ Then we learned that they were paying ten to 20,000 euros to get there. And I simply asked the question: ‘What happens when the brake is pulled? Where are those people going to go?’ They can’t come back to Croatia. We don’t want to be a waiting place for anyone. And if those people become frustrated, that negativity will spill over into local communities. And there was a hypocrisy at the time. We were taking men from places like Afghanistan, where we were investing a lot of money and asking them to fight for their countries, so they were not eligible for the protection that they were asking for. And when Afghanistan fell in 2021, we said, no more, you’re now not eligible for protection. So that is hypocrisy.
Was it right for Hungary to build a border fence at that time?
I was very upset about it at that time, because, you know, we didn’t even have a fence during the times of the Cold War. But I understood your right to protect yourselves, and the right to decide on whom you’re going to let in. When I get a visa to travel to Australia, the border authorities reserve the right to refuse my entry without any explanation. So if that goes for Australia, why not for any other country? It’s really your right to let into your country the people whom you deem eligible for protection or whom you need as a workforce. We do have the right to decide on our own future and what our countries will be like.
‘But I understood your right to protect yourselves, and the right to decide on whom you’re going to let in’
Migration is connected to another question. Some countries—including Hungary—try to solve the demographic problem and the qualified labour market problem with family policies, by encouraging young people to have children. What about that?
This is one of the issues where I’m still very critical of my country and my government, and when I was president, I was really frustrated by the lack of any strategy. I took the time, and I have to tell you that I literally locked myself in the office for about ten days, and I was studying different countries, I was studying Croatia’s own previous demographic plans, and I produced one that people who are experts in demography said: ‘Well, this is great.’ I presented the final version. And what happened? Nothing. Because the government thought of it rather as a competition. So they set up a working group on demography, but I haven’t seen any improvement. This is about the reasons why people leave, and most of the time, the reasons are the social climate, nepotism and corruption, lack of opportunities, rather than the salaries. The other one is the financial incentives: I think that the incentives should be somewhere where you can turn them over and produce new value. And that means housing for young people, different subsidies to employers, and numerous other issues.
We have to create reasons for them to return, and this is the role where the government comes in, listening first about the reasons why families don’t have more children, why people leave, what the problems are, and then addressing those problems, and not in the way that they think and what their idea is. I always said those Brussels bureaucrats should get among the people and see what life is about. This is what we encountered when we were negotiating our accession to the European Union. We made so many compromises in order to get in. And I think that we really caught the last train, because everything else has now been slowed down, and I hope we’ll be able to speed it up. Hungary is one of the countries that supports further enlargement in the Western Balkans, for instance.
‘I always said those Brussels bureaucrats should get among the people and see what life is about’
But what I noticed when we were negotiating was that these people had no clue what life was like in Croatia and why we needed certain subsidies that came out through our legislation in some areas. Brussels did not understand that because they did not live and experience that, and they did not even bother to visit those areas. So for them, those were statistics on paper, and that’s not what life is about.
PHOTO: Tamás Gyurkovits/Hungarian Conservative
You mentioned enlargement. Most of the European member states want to admit Ukraine to the European Union through a fast-track procedure. Don’t you fear that Croatia will be a net contributor in this case, and you will lose European funds because of that?
I often think about our own process. Most of the time, people were asking us: ‘What else do they want?’ They’re asking more from us than other countries had to fulfil. And I noticed that in the neighbouring countries, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Serbia, in Montenegro and elsewhere. And my explanation was always that it’s for us. We’re building our infrastructure. We’re building more transparent institutions. We’re building basically a better life for everyone, a better Croatia. And I saw how sceptical the population in Europe was about the absorption capacity of the European Union. And Croatia is a small country in comparison to Ukraine; we’re less than four million people now.
‘There are still areas in Ukraine under occupation, so that would mean internalizing the war…So obviously there needs to be a peace process’
I am not against Ukraine’s accession to the European Union. I welcome the fact that they were named candidates. However, I also expressed my disappointment that countries in my neighbourhood were not moving, although they are well advanced on the way to the European Union and probably fulfilled a lot more criteria than Ukraine has. So, we need to get rid of any hypocrisy. But I also believe that we need to assist Ukraine on the path to the European Union, and what it will look like, I don’t know, because there are still areas in Ukraine under occupation, so that would mean internalizing the war as well. So obviously there needs to be a peace process, and we will have to work. If Brussels has decided to move Ukraine forward, then a lot of people from Brussels will have to go and live in Ukraine in order to see what the real problems are, and how we’re going to solve them without bankrupting others and without damaging the cohesion.
Energy is the last topic I want to mention. The Hungarian government is under strong pressure from the EU to break away from Russian energy supplies, and to do this, we definitely need Croatian help with the Adria oil pipeline. Can the two companies have a good cooperation on transport?
I think so. Quite honestly, I’m not privy to the details of the dispute and the situation. I was involved in that when we were talking about the reverse flow connectors to Hungary, and when we were talking about building the LNG terminal, because we wanted Hungary to be part of it. You see the world today, with the situation at the Straits of Hormuz. So I do see that we can cooperate on that. I heard that our prime minister has made some proposals to your government as well, so I hope that they can solve it together.
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