Croatia will catch up in ten years' time with the member states which joined the EU before it did, Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic said on Monday at an international conference on the next decade in Croatia's European integration.

The conference was organised by the Zagreb Faculty of Law, in cooperation with the European Commission Representation in Croatia, on the occasion of the upcoming tenth anniversary of Croatia’s EU membership. Croatia joined the EU on 1 July 2013, more than ten years after applying.

Croatia’s EU accession process was much harder than it is perceived by a part of the public, Plenkovic said.

He spoke of the EU’s “wide-open arms” to Central Europe that left out Croatia, at that time a victim of Slobodan Milosevic’s Greater Serbia aggression.

In the 1990s, there was a lack of EU-Zagreb dialogue, yet during that whole time Croatian diplomats were urging old member states to “break” the regional approach to enlargement.

The cooperation with the Hague war crimes tribunal “took two years from” the negotiations and the border situation with Slovenia another two, Plenkovic said.

“Where we are now was complicated, politically difficult, institutionally demanding, and during that time an enormous job was being done to align Croatia’s legal and economic systems to the EU acquis,” he said, thanking the defenders by saying that without their fight for freedom, one could not have talked about integration.

Since the start of the millennium, Croatia has been catching up with the member states which began the integration process in the late 1980s, Plenkovic said, adding that at the end of the next decade, Croatia will have achieved that and society will have realised how far Croatia has come.

Croatia has achieved its strategic goals and succeeded on the financial front, but in considering “the element of society’s total identification, of the political actors in particular,” with those achievements, “we have a lot more work to do,” he said.

Plenkovic went on to say that as the politician who started regularly reporting to parliament about European Council meetings, he noticed “a very important” phenomenon for Croatia’s future in the EU, minimum identification by some political parties and leaders, that were not involved in the integration process, with the state’s strategic successes.

“When the actors who have no element of identification at all prevail, we’ll have a problem,” he said, adding that the essence of the European integration process is often not understood.

An example of that trend was Brexit, “a rarely seen” phenomenon,  which does not mean it won’t happen somewhere else also, Plenkovic said. “Issues like illegal migration, which are at the core of most societies’ reservations about further enlargement, are capital issues changing the political scenes in the old member states.”

The Commission’s vice president for demography and democracy, Dubravka Suica, said Croatia and Europe make each other stronger and that “today, we can freely say that Croatia’s voice is well-heard at the level of all institutions.”

“Today, Croatia is a strong, successful and influential EU member regardless of its size,” she added.