Croatia yesterday joined the EU bloc just over two decades after declaring independence from federal Yugoslavia, a step that triggered four years of war in which some 20,000 people died.

You need illusions to be joyful

Facing a fifth year of recession and record unemployment of 21 per cent, few Croatians are in the mood to party. The EU is mired in its own economic woes, which have created internal divisions and undermined popular support for the union.

EU flags fluttered from a stage in Zagreb’s central square ahead of the evening festivities, but there was little mood of celebration on the streets.

“Just look what’s happening in Greece and Spain! Is this where we’re headed?” said pensioner Pavao Brkanovic in a marketplace. “You need illusions to be joyful, but the illusions have long gone.”

President Ivo Josipovic told Croatia’s Nova TV on Saturday that journalists from EU countries had repeatedly asked him why Zagreb wanted to join the bloc.

“My counter question was: ‘You come from the EU. Is your country preparing to leave the bloc?’ They would invariably reply: ‘Of course not.’ Well, there you go, that’s why we are joining, because we also believe the EU has a future,” he said.

The country of 4.4 million people, with a coastline that attracts 10 million tourists each year, is one of seven that emerged from the ashes of Yugoslavia during a decade of war in the 1990s.

Slovenia was first to join the EU, in 2004. Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Kosovo are still years away.

Croatia has gone through seven years of tortuous and often unpopular EU-guided reform.

It has handed over more than a dozen Croatian and Bosnian Croat military and political leaders charged with war crimes to the UN tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague.

It has sold shipyards, steeped in history and tradition but deep in debt, and launched a fight against corruption that saw former Prime Minister Ivo Sanader jailed.

Some EU capitals remain concerned at the level of graft and organised crime.