European Commissioner for Enlargement Olli Rehn seems enamored with Zagreb. “Croatia is increasingly becoming a positive benchmark for the other countries of the Western Balkans,” he said two years ago. And more recently, in January, he commended Croatia for the “good overall progress it achieved toward its EU accession goal.” That’s a surprising statement given that Croatia remains wrecked by corruption, smuggling and organized crime. If it is a model for the Balkans, then the whole region is condemned to failure.

The Balkans’ twin legacies — communism and the recent wars — created a network of corrupt politicians and military officials and their private partners in crime. “A worrying number of gangland-style killings …have shocked public opinion,” the Economist wrote last month. “Croatia is plagued by corruption,” notes one commentator, Denis Kuljis, who adds ruefully that “the public do[es] not grasp the links that exist between gangsters and some in the political elite.”

During the 1990s international arms embargo, this network thrived and, as a 2006 European Union report on organized crime says, criminals “managed to legalize their dirty money and make additional profits. Some of those criminals can even present themselves as successful businessmen.”

Through the Balkan Route — a sinister conduit from the East to West — drugs, weapons and illegally trafficked humans are brought to the EU. Interpol says the central path of this organized-crime trail runs through Turkey, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, and into either Italy or Austria. The turmoil in Afghanistan, rising instability in Pakistan and resurgent terrorist networks have converged with the Balkan Route’s operators into a profitable alliance that brings Southwest Asian heroin to Europe.

Mr. Rehn’s exuberant assessment of Croatia’s “progress” raises questions about the integrity of the entire accession process. Enlargement has been the EU’s most successful policy for exporting democracy, the rule of law and free markets. By lowering its standards, the EU now risks importing the treacherous Balkan Route and its trappings of organized crime and corruption into the world’s largest trading block.

By NATASHA SRDOC and JOEL ANAND SAMY
from Adriatic Institute for Public Policy
for Wall Street Journal Europe