Croatian liberal
Vesna Pusic, Croatia’s foreign minister.
Does Croatia’s admission to the European Union, scheduled for July, now mostly depend on the good will of Slovenia? “No, it mostly depends on us,” Vesna Pusic, Croatia’s foreign minister, answered when asked by Croatian television at the end of the year. An ever so slightly wry smile illuminated Pusic’s face as she passed up an opportunity for what would be a popular bust-up with Croatia’s northern neighbour.
She has shunned crowd-pleasing statements in similar fashion ever since mid-2012, when Slovenia made clear that it was prepared to block Croatia’s EU membership over a €172 million bank dispute dating back to the break-up of Yugoslavia. While her Slovenian counterpart, Karl Erjavec, has repeatedly said that a solution is unlikely, Pusic has kept saying that it is within reach, as if her game-plan is to wear Ljubljana down with regular outbursts of constructiveness.
When, in October, the president of the German Bundestag dropped a small bombshell, saying that Croatia was not yet ready for accession, many Croatians were up in arms. The electorate, which had often viewed its politicians as too meek in dealings with the EU, would surely have applauded a strong response by their foreign minister. Instead, Pusic, who speaks German, limited her public reaction to saying she took all comments by German officials seriously and pledging that the government will fulfil all the remaining tasks set by the European Commission’s monitoring report on time.
Following the acquittal in November of two Croatian generals accused of war crimes against Serb civilians at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Pusic took it upon herself to explain – amid disconcerting scenes of public jubilation, complete with children allowed out of school – that the verdict did not exonerate those who had been found guilty in other war-crimes trials, nor would it have any bearing on future war-crimes trials in Croatia.
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This persistent refusal to take politics as a popularity contest may seem surprising for a card-playing politician from a small party that at least occasionally must crave a few more voters. Yet those who have followed the 59-year-old Pusic over the past two decades are not surprised at all.
Pusic, who still teaches at the sociology department of the Zagreb University, made a mark on public life in the former Yugoslavia as long ago as the late 1970s when, as a young academic, she co-founded the country’s first feminist group. She became prominent in the early 1990s as director of Erasmus Gilda, a civil-society organisation that articulated some of the most piercing criticisms of the regime of Franjo Tudjman, Croatia’s president throughout the 1990s.
Pusic joined the liberal Croatian People’s Party (HNS) when it was founded in 1990, but only became active in party politics in 1997. She was soon elected party leader and in 2000 entered parliament. Rather than moderating her activist rhetoric, Pusic has behaved ever since as if her whole purpose in politics is to tell the country things that it does not want to hear.
She shocked Croatia when she told parliament that the Tudjman regime’s involvement in the 1992-95 Bosnian war constituted an act of aggression. That does not, however, make her one of those international bleeding hearts who, without ever truly engaging with Bosnian issues, still shower the country’s largest ethnic group, the Bosniaks, with patronising sympathy for its suffering during the war, something that has only served to infantilise public life in Sarajevo. Without changing her take on the war, Pusic was, for example, quick to point out that Bosnia’s political set-up has made the country dysfunctional and routinely results in its ethnic Croats being marginalised and disenfranchised.
Pusic, whose elder brother Zoran is a prominent human-rights activist, has made herself a hate figure for Croatia’s misogynist, homophobic and xenophobic right by nearly always being the first politician to defend a liberal position on a social issue. IVF for unmarried women, including those without a partner? LGBT rights, including parenting? Fines for those buying sexual services, rather than only for those selling them? Equality for marginalised groups, such as Roma? Even a decade ago, few would have imagined that much progress on such issues would be possible in Croatia, a country that has yet to shake off the image of a grumpy little place with a beautiful coast and pro-Nazi football supporters. Yet those issues are now part of the mainstream, either in the shape of fresh or planned legislation or of a foreign minister who regularly marches (now even accompanied by other ministers) at Gay Pride events and chides the country for its attitudes toward the Roma.
“Sane voices are often in a minority in the beginning – the women who fought for their rights; those fighting for the right to education; or those who really thought the Earth was round,” Pusic told the organisers of Zagreb Pride 2011, who named her Croatia’s ‘Homofriend of the Decade’.
Such stances have not made the HNS popular – it now has 14 seats in the 151-seat parliament – and, even if Pusic is polished in manner, she sometimes betrays a short fuse when meting out enlightenment to a disobliging general public. She chaired the national committee monitoring accession talks with the EU for three years before becoming foreign minister (she was also vice-president of the European Liberal Democratic and Reform Party) and once dismissed Croatia’s Eurosceptics as uneducated following an anti-EU rant by a member of the public, prompting accusations of an aloof elitism that imposes its worldly ways on an unwilling country.
Pusic grew up in a stimulating environment, with both of her parents coming from well-educated families of achievers. Her mother Visnja was an English and French teacher, while her polyglot father, Eugen, taught administration at Zagreb University. Their daughter remembers frequent discussions on social and political issues with her father, who died in 2010, with the two agreeing on most issues. It was a cosmopolitan family – her father spent several stints abroad as a lecturer at a number of universities and also served as an expert on welfare for the secretary-general of the United Nations. Pusic added to the international dimension in 1986, by marrying a US entrepreneur and nuclear engineer of Lithuanian descent (their daughter currently studies filmmaking in London).
Pusic perhaps also had the good fortune to spend her formative years in the relatively enabling environment of an increasingly open and affluent Yugoslavia of the late 1960s and 1970s, when opportunities for education and social emancipation were within the reach of many. Pusic is, in effect, a reminder that there is a liberal tradition in Croatia and the Balkans, and is now that tradition’s leading light.
Curriculum vitae
1953: Born, Zagreb
1976: Gains a degree in sociology and philosophy, University of Zagreb
1976-78: Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana
1978-: Fills various academic roles (including professor), sociology department, University of Zagreb
1984: Gains doctorate in sociology, University of Zagreb
1993-98: Founder and director of Erasmus Gilda, a non-governmental organisation
2000-08: Leads the Croatian People’s Party (HNS)
2000-11: Member of parliament
2003-07: Deputy speaker of parliament
2006-12: Vice-president of the European Liberal Democratic and Reform Party
2008-11: Chairs the national committee monitoring Croatia’s accession talks with the EU
2008-11: Chairs the HNS’s parliamentary group
2011-: Foreign and European affairs minister
2012-: Deputy prime minister