Watery Spaces, Globalizing Places: Ownership and Access in Postsocialist Croatia

Many scholars have characterized political and economic globalization as entailing deterritorialization, a radical decentering of place and the erasing of various kinds of borders. This paper argues instead for an alternative view of globalization as reterritorialization, a process in which meanings of place remain salient (and in some cases become even more pronounced) but are reconfigured. The analysis focuses on transformations of understandings of territory and ownership in coastal Croatia, examining diverse Croatian responses to the privatization of the tourist industry and the speculative boom in vacation properties. In particular, the paper considers how the politics of European integration and Croatia's aspirations for EU membership – together with the heritage of Croatia's recent past of nationalist warfare – shape Croatia's economic transition from a regime of “social property” under socialist Yugoslavia to a neoliberal regime of private property. The chapter also examines the metaphors of fluidity in vogue for describing globalization, using understandings of actual property in (and on) water to reflect critically on conceptual models of globalization.