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The article examines politics and government in Croatia related to that country's candidacy for membership in the European Union. While Croatia has met many of the economic and public finance requirements for membership, it is still under pressure from the EU to cooperate in the arrest and prosecution of suspected Croatian war criminals from the wars related to the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Croatian political opinion on EU membership is seen as falling into two major camps, those who support EU membership as necessary for Croatia's economic viability and those who reject on nationalist and religious grounds. Those who support EU membership but are skeptical of some of the policies and the structure of the EU are discussed in terms of overall opinion towards the EU in Europe.

Europeanization -- as the process of standardization of public policies in order to provide a common ground for the new modus operandi in politics and of the polity itself -- requires an overall reshaping of the political discourse in the acceding countries during the process of EU accession. This means the reshaping of the basic political concepts and political paradigms under way in one country. Security is one of the main concepts upon which the existence of a polity is based. The way in which security is conceived determines the political strategy, political tactics and political activities pertinent to the goal set up and formulated in a security concept. Croatia, as an acceding country, needs to refurbish its basic political values, and security certainly falls within this frame. Croatia adopted its National Security Strategy in 2002 and this security concept was an obvious product of concrete circumstances, experiences and political discourse of the time. As the author asserts, the concept of security laid down in this security strategy belongs to an obsolete frame of mind, arising from a traumatic decade of ethnic wars, nationalism and a controversial transition. Croatia has emerged from the post-conflict traumatic experience and the period of an authoritarian transition, in which the adaptation to new values was slow and turbulent. The National Security Strategy of the Republic of Croatia reflects these contradictions and controversies in its society and its international environment. This work claims that the national security concept of Croatia relied greatly on the classical approach to state security and did not reflect the latest development in the field of strategic thinking. As an example, the author points to the gap between the Croatian national security concept and its basic values and the concept of human security, as laid down in the UNDP basic documents on human development. In addition, it did not reflect the concept of cooperative security that requires from a nation to work in an international context in order to avoid transnational threats. Croatia needs the Europeanization of the security discourse and the reformulation of a new National Security Strategy, pertinent to its membership in the NATO and in the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]