Citizenship and Social Welfare in Croatia: Clientelism and the Limits of ‘Europeanisation’

Abstract

This article addresses clientelism as a complex structure impacting on social welfare in the context of transition, war, new nation-state building and authoritarian populist political settlements. The paper explores the development of clientelistic welfare in Croatia through an examination of captured and categorical distributional effects, the dominance of nationality over territorial-based citizenship claims, and the politicisation of the nature and scale of governance. The privileging of the rights of war veterans and of those of Croatian ethnicity particularly from neighbouring Bosnia-Herzegovina constitute dominant clientelistic practices largely resistant to change. The capacity of the European Union (EU) accession process to counter clientelistic aspects of welfare has proved to be extremely limited. Although the accession process impacted on and reconfigured economic, political and social arrangements, this was not a radical ‘break’ with the social and political circumstances, particularly in the 1990s, which had produced and consolidated these clientelistic welfare arrangements. Indeed, after the gaining of EU membership on 1 July 2013, with the translation of EU-led austerity politics, ideas of social citizenship may be unravelling once more in Croatia.