The accession has changed the country from inside. Virtually everything is different and today it is a better country than it was when the process began, he said at a conference on the progress and challenges on Croatia's road towards EU membership organised by the German Hanns Seidel foundation.
Croatia is proof that the Stabilisation and Association process, which the EU designed a dozen years ago for Southeast European countries, gives results, that reforms pay in the end, Mimica said, adding that as an EU member Croatia would push for enlargement to its neighbours.
He underlined the importance of the consensus reached between Croatia's political parties on EU accession, saying it had considerably facilitated the process.
The director of the Directorate-General for Enlargement, Stefano Sannino, said Croatia could wait with confidence for the final pre-accession monitoring report which the European Commission would release next week.
He said Croatia would not have post-accession monitoring because the negotiations and the pre-accession monitoring were conceived so that the country could be completely prepared for membership, without the need for post-accession monitoring.
The Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) party's observer in the European Parliament, Andrej Plenkovic, said Croatia's first priority upon joining would be to boost the competitiveness of its economy.
Mimica, who is being mentioned as Croatia's first commissioner in the European Commission, told reporters after the conference that the procedure for the appointment of the commissioner would begin after Croatia's elections for the European Parliament due on April 14. He said Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso had still not revealed which portfolio the Croatian commissioner would get.
According to unofficial information, the Croatian commissioner could be given the consumer policy portfolio, in which case the current department for health and consumer policy chaired by Tonio Borg of Malta would be divided into two, one for health and one for consumer policy.