Legitimising the Food Regime in Post‐Socialist Croatia: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Croatia's Agricultural Strategies, 1991 to 2013

ABSTRACT What role has the state played in the establishment of the current food regime in a post‐socialist setting? Focusing on Croatia, I undertake a critical discourse analysis of the national agricultural strategies enacted during the neoliberal transition between 1991 and 2013. I find that the state discursively legitimised the emergence and consolidation of the current food regime through two dominant tactics: (1) the collective diagnostic framing of peasants, family farmers and socialist agriculture as the ‘problem’ and (2) the deployment of ostensibly ‘rational’ language. Presenting a sociopolitical history of Croatia's neoliberal transition, I argue that the principal material beneficiaries of the state‐legitimised food regime have predominantly been the political and economic elite of the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), who rose to power during the corrupt privatisations of socialist‐era enterprises in the 1990s and set Croatia on a path of clientelism and criminality. Today, Croatia exists as a small, globally integrated state of negligible political sway that is effectively captured by a single dominant political party. The novel dynamics of this situation in the agricultural sector do not easily fit within existing food regime conceptualisations.