Croatia Urged to Fine Tune Foreign Policy Goals

Croatia needs to precisely set its foreign policy goals and plan its international diplomatic initiatives more thoroughly, according to Dejan Jovic, a professor at the Zagreb Faculty of Political Sciences and chief analyst to former President Ivo Josipovic.

Jovic commended Croatia for recently taking "a more active role in foreign politics", but warned that its actions must be better thought through and defined.

"A pro-active foreign policy, one that seeks to act before something happens, is hard to conduct ... and it carries certain risks," he told BIRN.

Regarding Croatia's attempt to play a brokering role in resolving the crisis in Ukraine as well as in Bosnia and Herzegovina, "Croatia should be careful and should not try to resolve issues that are 'a hot potato' even for bigger players on the international scene," Jovic continued.

The crisis in Ukraine is of direct interest to the US and Russia, while in Bosnia, besides these two powers, Turkey is involved as well, he noted.

Croatian relations with Russia have worsened since Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic visited Ukraine recently, accused Russia of committing aggression there and, after calling Russia's annexation of Crimea "illegal", offered the two sides the experience of the peaceful reintegration of eastern parts of Croatia in the late 1990s as a model for reintegrating Russian-controlled territory in Ukraine.

Russia's foreign ministry snubbed Croatia's offer of its own experience on ending such conflicts and sharply criticised Plenkovic's statements.

Soon after coming to power, Plenkovic visited Bosnia and Herzegovina in late October, emphasising the importance of ths neighbour in Croatian foreign policy.

Only days later, however, on October 31, the Bosnian...