Original scientific paper
Advantages of Subordination, Weaknesses of Emancipation? How Croatian Agricultural Entrepreneurs Perceive the EU
Orlanda Obad
orcid.org/0000-0003-4383-4913
; Institut for Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The author examines the notions of EU within an elite group of agricultural entrepreneurs, who have applied to EU pre-accession funds for agriculture, such as SAPARD or IPARD. Although the members of this social group are among few Croatian citizens who directly received funding from the European Union, most of them exhibited skeptical views regarding Croatian accession process, ranging from the lack of trust in positive outcomes of Union’s policies in the agricultural domain, to the pessimistic expectations that most of Croatian agriculture will simply be wiped out once the country joins the EU. One of the common positive features in agricultural entrepreneur’s perception of EU was a firm belief that the membership will bring "more order” to Croatian state structures. In the article, this notion is explained through interviewees’ descriptions of their everyday entrepreneurial practices. Squeezed in-between strict deadlines for project submissions, the seasonal works that need to be carried out, and an atmosphere which is all but business-friendly, their overstrained everyday routine limited the entrepreneurs’ perspective to "here and now”, making the conversations about local, regional or continental symbolic geography a somewhat frivolous pastime to which only members of the privileged elites can commit to. From this perspective, cultural divides, characteristic of symbolic geographies, were much less important than economic divides, which, in their view, clearly separated "those who earn their own money” from "those who live off of state”. In a similar vein, opposition between socialism and capitalism was much more salient and interpretatively fruitful than opposition between Central Europe and the Balkans, or Eastern and Western Europe. The author also questions the work of those scholars who focus on the EU enlargement in the Balkans by stressing the imperial features of its policies while, at the same time, overlooking and omitting the emancipatory potential of the implementation of EU rules and regulations in the specific local contexts.
Keywords
notions about the EU; Croatian accession to the EU; agricultural entrepreneurs; symbolic geography; SAPARD
Hrčak ID:
93970
URI
Publication date:
20.12.2012.
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