A Soldier’s State? Veterans and the Welfare Regime in Croatia

Abstract

the paper theorizes about the type of welfare state that emerged in Croatia post-1990, focusing specifically on ways in which the evolution of welfare programmes for veterans, and the gradual strengthening of veteran organizations as pivotal political actors, impacted its morphology. Croatia currently has a population of around 500,000 registered veterans, which in the mid-1990 started organizing into powerful organizations. Partly in response to this mobilization, from 1994 onwards hDZ governments created a comprehensive institutional architecture of entitlements for veterans, instituting durable material linkages alongside symbolic ties to this population. the prominence of veterans as a pivotal political actor has impacted the development of the welfare regime in Croatia. Strong reliance on the family for a broad range of care work is the central feature Croatia shares with other conservative welfare regimes, while the clientelist character of state-society relations relates it specifically to their Southern variant. Distinctly, the "compensatory" character of welfare programmes, which is characteristic of veteran programmes, and of family policy in Croatia generally, creates contradictory impulses. What seems to have emerged is a specific clientelist variant of a conservative welfare regime, sustained by veteran mobilizations, while at the same time eroded by the dependency, resentment and a myriad of other social impacts of these programmes. future research on the welfare state in Croatia will hopefully further explore the arguments that this paper brings forward.

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“…they have political influence and receive many benefits), but many of them are disillusioned with the postwar situation (Pupavac and Pupavac, 2012). One element of their frustration is the fact that many men who did not fight in the war also received the status of branitelj (defender) (Dolenec, 2017). While they are rhetorically celebrated by nationalist political parties, not much was done to advance their reintegration in postwar society (Sokolic, 2019).…”

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“…These rights, claimable by some 500,000 registered war veterans, some 12 per cent of the total Croatian population, are largely passive and, crucially, transmissible inter‐generationally, with the children of war veterans receiving positive discrimination in terms of higher education enrolment, for example. Crucially, the fact that such benefits reach around two per cent of GDP (Dolenec, : 63), compared to a mere 0.4 per cent of GDP spent on social assistance for the poor (Stubbs and Zrinščak, ), illustrates the distorting effects of such benefits and the difficulty of creating a welfare system based on need. The construction of a ‘moral asymmetry’ (Dolenec, : 60) in terms of an unrepayable debt owed by the state and the Croatian population to war veterans, a group that mobilizes against any talk of curbing their rights, is a determining structuring factor in Croatian social policy.…”

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“…Social spending was extensive, but narrowly targeted one stratum: war veterans and their families (for details on the compensatory nature of these policies see Begić and al. 2007;Dobrotić 2008;Stubbs and Zrinščak 2009;Dolenec 2017). His analysis is based on cases of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.…”

“…Croatian social policy making is described as "captured" (Stubbs and Zrinščak 2009) and "compensatory" (Begić and al. 2007;Dobrotić 2008;Stubbs and Zrinščak 2009;Dolenec 2017), the mobilizing role of labour unions as moderate (Grdešić 2008), and a large share of the population as relying on clientelistic relations with the state (Bohle and Greskovits 2012). ganized interests and electoral preferences.…”