European Forum

Slovenians vote in favour of border deal with Croatia

Yesterday (6 June) Slovenians narrowly approved a border arbitration deal with Croatia in a referendum. The vote should boost Croatia's chances of joining the EU in 2012 if it succeeds in completing entry talks in the next year.

Preliminary election results showed that 51.5% of Slovenes supported the deal, the Slovenian Electoral Commission announced on its website yesterday after 99.9% of the votes had been counted. Final results are due on 29 June. The commission said that 42.28% of some 1.7 million eligible voters in Slovenia turned out for the referendum.

Historic moment
Under the border arbitration deal, an international team will settle a dispute between Slovenia and Croatia over the land and sea border that dates from the 1991 break-up of Yugoslavia. The ruling would be binding for both countries.

Croatian President Ivo Josipovic welcomed the news, describing the outcome of the vote as “an important victory for Slovenia, Croatia and Europe”. “This contributes to the concept of the European Union enlargement which includes Croatia and will in the future include all the countries in southeast Europe,” Josipovic said in a press release. Josipovic, who spoke to Slovenian President Danilo Türk and Prime Minister Borut Pahor by phone after the polls closed, said that the outcome of the vote will contribute to “friendly relations between Croatia and Slovenia”. Croatian Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor also praised the decision by Slovenian voters, saying she expected that there “will be no more roadblocks” set up by Ljubljana on her country’s path to EU membership.

EU relieved
European Commission President José Manuel Barroso welcomed the referendum result. "This is an important step forward [...] We now look forward to a final settlement of the dispute. Resolving this bilateral issue is an important signal for the region and the relations between Slovenia and Croatia," he said in a statement.

Background
Slovenia joined the EU in 2004, the only former Yugoslav state so far to have done so. Like any other EU member, it can veto Croatia's progress towards EU membership.
Croatia is on the brink of becoming the first country to join the EU since the accession of Romania and Bulgaria in 2007. The country is expected to complete its accession negotiations by the end of 2010. But during the 2008 French EU Presidency, Slovenia blocked the opening of nine out of ten negotiating chapters with Zagreb due to an unresolved 19-year old border dispute in the Adriatic Sea. The dispute concerns small pockets of land along the Adriatic coast, which could prove important if accompanied by exclusive rights to deep-sea zones. Unlike Slovenia, Croatia has a long coastline, prompting Ljubljana to attempt to assert its rights as a "geographically disadvantaged state".

Last year, however, the PMs of both countries Pahor and Kosor agreed that the dispute would not constitute an obstacle to Croatia's accession. In November they agreed to allow international arbitration settle the matter. But while both the Croatian and Slovenian parliaments approved the agreement reached between the two leaders, the Slovenian government decided to give the public the final say.

During the four weeks of the pre-referendum campaign, Slovenia's center-left government urged the country's voters to support the agreement, with Pahor warning that Slovenia risked being “isolated and misunderstood” by the international community if they failed to do so. In the meantime, the leading Slovenian opposition party, the SDS of former Prime Minister Janez Jansa, called on voters to reject the deal, describing it as ‘capitulation’ and evidence of a ‘servile mentality’.

Sources: Balkan Insight; Euractiv; EU Observer