ABSTRACT
This paper explores the governance and lived realities of citizenship and social welfare in the Republic of Croatia. It suggests that some important aspects of welfare entitlements, particularly in connection with citizenship, cannot be adequately understand and described without invoking the concept of clientelism. Although taking different forms in different historical conjunctures, clientelistic forms of capture, defined here as consisting of distorted modes of governance, exclusivist definitions of citizenship and an asymmetric redistribution of resources, continue to structure social welfare in Croatia. Clientelism, then, represents a strong structural force in politics, the economy and social policy, encompassing far more than a ‘mindset’ (Stambolieva, 2015). Clientelism may be explicit, when particular political elites trade directly favours for votes, or it can be institutional or hegemonic, defining an
informal political common sense. Furthermore, the article argues that not only because of slow and late Europeanisation in Croatia compared to other Central and Eastern Europe countries, but also because of the very nature of the Europeanisation process, the capacity of accession to restrain the clientelistic aspects of welfare was 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 EuropeanUnion (EU)membership on 1 July 2013,with the translation of EU-led austerity politics, ideas of social citizenship may be unravelling once more. The paper begins by sketching the relationship between governance, citizenship and
social welfare at diverse scales before addressing the issue of clientelism in general and in its post-communist and Southern European variants. This is then followed by an overview of the changing contours of both citizenship and social welfare in Croatia and the extent to which they have been affected by clientelism and other forms of exclusivity, notably ethnicised nationalism. A tentative final section outlines the prospects for changes in these arrangements in the context of the current economic and financial crisis and, in addition, the prospects for change in the light of EU membership.
