Croatia joins European Union

Croatia has been a member of the European Union since 2013.

July 2013 accession after negotiations and ratification

Croatia became the European Union's twenty-eighth member state on July 1, 2013, completing an accession process that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia and years of institutional reforms. Croatia applied for EU membership on February 21, 2003, and opened formal accession negotiations on October 3, 2005. Negotiations closed in June 2011, and the accession treaty was signed on December 9, 2011. In a referendum on January 22, 2012, 66.27 percent of participating Croatian voters backed accession, according to the Croatian foreign ministry's account published July 2, 2013.

In April 2013, the European Parliament endorsed Croatia's readiness while calling for continuing attention to governance, judicial reform and corruption. Parliament's June 27 briefing announced the July 1 welcoming ceremony, at which Croatia's representatives joined the legislature of an enlarged union. Accession made Croatian citizens and institutions participants in EU decision-making rather than leaving Croatia merely a candidate bound by the negotiation process. It also imposed obligations to apply European law, subject to transitional arrangements negotiated in advance.

The European Central Bank confirmed on July 1 that Croatia's central bank had entered the European System of Central Banks, but that Croatia had not yet adopted the euro. The later Croatian euro and Schengen accession was a different milestone and must not be backdated to 2013. Croatia joined EU-wide institutional debates later relevant to European financial supervision and European health cooperation, neither of which constituted the July 2013 accession decision itself. Membership meant broader rights and obligations for the state and its citizens, while disputes over judicial independence, corruption and implementation of the acquis continued to require domestic reforms. The event's exact legal consequence was entry into the Union on July 1, 2013, after all accession instruments had been ratified.