Suchergebnisse

The article explores the Croatian and Montenegrin EU accession path as a two-sided disciplining process established through the negotiations. The "success" of the EU's civilising mission in the two countries is determined through the feedback/dialogue relationship formed between the EU and the candidate country. I analyse two aspects of the accession negotiations: cooperation with the ICTY and the rule of law institutions. In Croatia, the domestic elites' determination to ensure the membership paired up with the EU's civilising mission in the Balkans. In Montenegro, the EU membership has not outright represented the mythical return to Europe, hence initially self-civilising was not high on the list of the priorities. Moreover, Montenegro was the success story of the Balkans and the EU initially did not insist on the institutional development. The paper contributes to the wider EU enlargement literature by specifically emphasizing the cultural studies framework and by emphasizing the importance of the overlooked feedback/dialogue characteristics of the accession process.

Although impact of tourism on the economy has been researched in the literature, the results of studies deliver varying conclusions leaving the field open to further studies. While the literature has so far dealt with cases of large tourism sectors, there has been no research on cases of dominant tourism sector in transitional post-socialist economies. Tourism certainly plays an important role in the Croatian economy, but so far research tested the impact it actually has on economic growth. This paper attempts to fill this gap by testing what is the long-term impact of tourism on growth of GDP. The author tests whether tourism enables increase in level of productive factors and indirectly ensures long-term development (TKIG hypothesis), or it contributes by delivering short-term profits. The results of the paper imply that TKIG hypothesis is confirmed in the case of Croatia. Tourism receipts can enable increase in capital goods imports and there is a mechanism through which increase in tourism specific productive factors leads to economic growth. However, the organization of the tourism sector, as well as political elite's attitudes towards tourism have an important effect on determining impact tourism has on the economy.

Taking Croatia as a case in point, the authors compare the influence of spatial planning on tourism urbanization. To understand how tourism and spatial planning have interacted on a subnational level, two tourism centres on the Adriatic coast, Poreč in Istria and Makarska in Dalmatia, were chosen as case studies. The authors argue that while tourism-driven urbanization during the socialist era favoured the development of hotels paired with quality communal infrastructure and public facilities, the subsequent socio-economic transformation has oriented tourism investments towards private profit in ways that have often led to the neglect of public interest and facilities. The two chosen cases represent different paths, however. In the last thirty years, Makarska has fallen prey to what has come to be called apartmanizacija (apartmentization)—an usurpation of valuable coastal space through the uncontrolled construction of private apartments. Poreč, on the other hand, has maintained its well-planned space by carefully rebuilding and upgrading its hotel capacities.

""We have to abandon liberal methods and principles of organizing a society. The new state that we are building is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state" Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban famously said in 2014, exemplifying a broader trend taking place in Central Europe. Why would the countries that were praised as democratization and Europeanization success stories take an illiberal turn? This volume explores changing values and attitudes to explain events that took place in the aftermath of the financial and migration crisis in six Central European countries: Croatia, Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia"--