Zagreb is Late

Transition is a word you meet often when you read about Zagreb. The word is easily transposable, ideal for use in a variety of different situations and contexts. Perhaps that is why it has been used so frequently to describe the capital of what is now the republic of Croatia. On the surface of things the word does its job: After all, in just under one hundred years, Zagreb has wandered through different countries, empires, governments and ideologies. The city has travelled through periods of war and peace to emerge at the very edge of Europe, waiting for admittance to the European Union. Now, well after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the break up of Yugoslavia, academics and bureaucrats use the word transition to speak about this region’s post-socialist countries and the journey towards capitalism and the West.

But “transition” may be too tidy a word. Here in Zagreb, with its crumbling Medieval core, its shabby Austro-Hungarian administrative palaces and its rings of suburbs and massive housing projects from the Communist era, you begin to suspect that there are difficulties with the West’s interpretation of the way other places change. For example, reading various studies and reports on the city of Zagreb makes it clear that “transition” implies a change from one definite quality into another, as though apart from its general location the city had ever been one definable entity.

Apart from the question of what kind of place Zagreb may or may not have been, I find myself asking just what it is that this city is assumed to be moving to. Shifting priorities in the European Union, quiet struggles for influence between the United States, the E.U. and its various member countries as well as the changing nature of advanced capitalism means that we cannot use the concept of transition to mean that Zagreb or any other post-socialist city will ever reach the place we think it will. Behind our Western use of words such as “transition” and “transitional” is a belief that Zagreb is not quite where we want it to be. In a sense, we are trying to designate the manner in which the city always seems to have lagged slightly behind the events and forces that have shaped this region’s history. It is as though Zagreb, baggage in hand, has been constantly late for its appointments and is compelled to catch up with something or other depending on the direction of the historical winds. And what the word “transition” misses is the fact that Zagreb may not ever arrive in time for the appointments we have set for it.