Cicero's Songs

Amidst all the bad news on the EU it is good to able to report that Croatia has just received the formal approval of the European Parliament to join the European Union. I have not blogged on the process for a long time, but the upheaval that has been involved for Croatia has been considerable. The country has taken the issues of corruption and good governance extremely seriously, and there has been a determined effort to ensure that all evidence of wrong doing is fully investigated- indeed even the former Prime Minister Ivo Sanader has been forced to face prosecution after being extradited from Austria.  The discipline that this process has involved is remarkable to those who knew the country through the course of the the war of the mid nineties. Then there were so many problems that Zagreb had to tackle, it was hard to believe that the political system could cope. Having won the war, politicians seemed to become torpid and greedy. The progress of the late 1990s evaporated, ...

Having snuck off for a few days in Croatia I have rediscovered the virtues of sloth when it comes to blogging. The sunshine helps lift the clouds of gloom that I feel as I contempate my own country, though this may be partly because the Croatians are more or less totally relaxed about anything, despite the fairly parlous state of affiars here. I think that they probably do not have a word as urgent as "manana" in Spanish. Certainly in the fifteen or so years that I have been coming here there is still much that remains totally unaltered. As the moon rises over the stone houses here in Trbinj, a very small town on the Peljesac peninsula, I now feel that I should turn my attention towards this large beer rather than my computer keyboard.

The sixtieth anniversary of the signing of the NATO treaty in Washington in 1949 is now upon us. The organisation designed, in the words of Lord Ismay, its first Secretary General, to "keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans down" has been a considerable success. To mark the occasion, the two states that fought three wars within sixty years, France and Germany, are co-hosting the anniversary summit and inevitably the contrast between the last sixty years of general peace and the previous sixty years of horrific bloodshed will be a great part of the symbolism of the meeting. However, there are two items of substantive business on the agenda and yet they too will be occasions of great rejoicing. On Monday the flags of two new member states will be raised outside NATO headquarters in Brussels after the formal ratification and acceptance of Albania and Croatia as NATO member states. I have worked closely with the government in Albania and have visited the count...