Warning: Eurozone Turbulence Ahead For Croatia

Croatia’s Prime Minister
Andrej Plenkovic

According to Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic’s words on Monday 30 October 2017 at an economic conference devoted to the introduction of the euro in Croatia, Croatia aims to become a Eurozone member within the next seven to eight years.

So now what? Can the madness of Eurozone failure and struggle be stopped from infecting Croatia? The United Kingdom’s 2016 shock referendum vote for Brexit was a warning about the gap between angry voters and pro-immigration, pro-globalisation élites. Globalisation in the eyes of those that voted for Brexit would rather apply to spreading ones country’s interests across the globe than being a part of a melting-pot of countries tied by a union, such as the EU, in which pot some countries suffer while others, particularly the bigger ones, benefit. As Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, has memorably said in 2014 on Eurozone economic policy and democracy, “We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.” That doesn’t sound like a prediction of radical reform. It’s a dangerous moment for Europe.

In 1992, the European Union made what the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz in August of 2016 called “a fatal decision”: the choice “to adopt a single currency, without providing for the institutions that would make it work.”  In “The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe” (Norton), Stiglitz lucidly and forcefully argues that this was an economic experiment of unprecedented magnitude: “No one had ever tried a monetary union on such a scale, among so many countries that were so disparate.”

When Lehman Brothers collapsed, in September, 2008, and the global financial crisis hit, all Western economies went into recession, but the Eurozone countries suffered the most and for the longest. The U.S. unemployment rate hit ten per cent for a single month in 2009 and is now below five per cent; the Eurozone unemployment rate hit ten per cent around the same time, and it was only in July 2017 that it fell just below that figure while in individual countries there it still lingers in double digits. The Eurozone’s economy is smaller than it was when the crisis hit and many world’s top economy experts, including Stiglitz, the euro is to blame for all this underperformance. But let’s say the euro can’t be blamed for everything economically grim in the Eurozone and if it’s not only the euro then one can safely argue that the economic politics attached to it certainly complete the picture of failure causes. Eurozone takes away the two main monetary tools a country can use to manage its economy. The first is to cut interest rates in order to stimulate demand and the second is to reduce the value of the currency in order to stimulate exports.

In Europe, the first thing that happened after the crisis was that all the bubbles popped. The “peripheral” countries suffered dramatic economic contractions, compounded by bank implosions, and had to appeal for financial assistance to avert complete collapse. To make things even darker, a complex mixture of international politics, economics, and law meant that the body that stepped in to help the crisis economies was a triple-headed entity, the Troika, made up of the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund.

The Troika had strong views about how the afflicted economies should be fixed. They rolled into town demanding austerity, meaning severe cuts to government spending, and structural reform, meaning changes to the way a country’s economy works. They doled out money on the condition that these policies were implemented, and accompanied the package with fancy charts showing how the economy was going to recover after the austerity medicine took effect. It is, if you have a twisted sense of humour, just possible to see the funny side of these bailout-and-austerity packages, especially the ones concerning Greece. The numbers are grim, and the human realities are worse—joblessness, hopelessness, forced emigration, spikes in the suicide rate.

The pendulum swings no differently in Croatia. It has not all this time been a member of the Eurozone, but has since 2013 as member state of EU been affected by the Troika medicine, or should we say – infection.

And now we have Croatia revving to jump into the Eurozone disaster zone! One wonders how much of the revving fuel is contained in a wild notion of romanticising about the saving power of Eurozone amidst current threats of bankrupting Croatia that are unfolding in dealing with “Agrokor” disaster and corruption has been poured into the political plights to save Croatia’s government from falling – yet again!

“We don’t want to specify the exact dates, but we want Croatia to become a euro zone member within two government terms in office,” Plenkovic said during the conference on 30 October 2017, continuing: “We have two key aims – one is to join the Schengen area, or rather be ready for the political decision in 2019, and the other is to join the Eurozone.”

EU members that have not yet adopted the euro are expected to spend at least two years in the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) II, a mechanism aimed to ensure currency stability before joining the eurozone.

Plenkovic’s centre-right HDZ government came to power in 2016, three years after Croatia joined the EU. Croatia is still one of the poorest member states and its economy contracted steadily from 2008 to 2015, with a mild rebound in the last two years. The Croatian central bank already keeps the kuna currency in a narrowly managed float, with minor fluctuations during the year, and steps in to prevent sharp changes by intervening on the local exchange market.

The toughest challenge for Croatia to join the Eurozone will be bringing the public debt level to below 60% of GDP. It is slightly above 80% of GDP now. “Our goal is to reduce the public debt to 72% of GDP by 2020 … We are undertaking a major fiscal consolidation and this year the budget gap will be even lower than last year’s 0.9% of GDP,” Plenkovic said.

Central Bank Governor Boris Vujcic said Croatia was the most “euroised” EU country of those that had not yet adopted the euro (Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Romania and Bulgaria).

“Some 75% of local deposits and 67% of local debt is denominated in the euro. Some 60% of Croatia’s trade exchange is related to the euro zone, while 70% of tourism receipts comes from the euro zone countries,” Vujcic told the conference.

It is, however, crystal clear that over time the EU  has no longer been pursuing the route of a free trade area but it became increasingly politicised, and the idea was to set up a centralised power structure in Brussels to transfer national sovereignty rights on to the supranational decision making structure. Now the EU policy is about interventionism, they try to interfere in all sorts of economic and social fields to push through all kinds of political concepts and that’s a very dangerous idea. This being so, one cannot quietly and compliantly accept Prime Miniser Andrej Plenkovic’s statement from 30 October 2017 in which he said: “We said yes to the Eurozone when we joined the EU. The reason we’re not there yet is that we still have to meet all the criteria and not because we need the political decision.” This only gives muscle to the EU political battle for survival while living standards in Croatia keep plummeting and working-age people keep emigrating in droves. What a mess! It’s a mess that can possibly be sorted to benefit Croatia, rather than the EU, by people political power. If Croatia’s government keeps referring to the EU referendum of 2012 as something Croatian people committed themselves to then the reality and people-legitimacy of that referendum needs to be re-examined. It was, after all, a referendum at which barely 29% of Croatian voters turned out for voting! Ina Vukic