The Croatian deputy prime minister said on Tuesday that Croatia sees its EU membership as an important tool for state-building and a guarantee for long-term stability.

Vesna Pusic, who is also foreign minister of the country, made the remark at a forum during her trip to China from November 4 to 8.

One conclusion people can draw from the wars among the former Yugoslavian states in the 1990s is that "in wars, states can win and lose, but societies only lose," she said.

"There's no society that ever won a war, because even if a state has won, the scars of brutalization, the losses, the attack of older values that comes with the wars, take a long time for any society to recover," she said, adding that the EU membership is "a reliable blueprint" for state building and institutional infrastructure building.

Croatia joined the EU in July, becoming the second state from former Yugoslavia to join the bloc, after Slovenia. Montenegro is in the process of accession negotiations, while the EU has approved to start accession negotiations with Serbia in January 2014.

The deputy prime minister also said countries from the former Yugoslavia have a long history of "a curse of small numbers," which she explained as "problems of surviving, maintaining, and developing political, geographical and every other identity on the crossroads between and among big empires."

She added that the original impetus that tore the former Yugoslavia apart was not "different nationalisms," but the struggle for power and control of the whole region.

Naming "the stability of institutions, the longevity of the state, and the predictability of the rules, which includes legislation, as the key prerequisites for success," the deputy prime minister said that is why Croatia sees EU membership as "an important tool in building our own state, in using the so-called fast-track, in getting ourselves out of the wars of the 1990s, to which you have guarantees of long-term stability," despite criticisms from all sides.

Also on Tuesday, Pusic held talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, who called for closer cooperation with Croatia and expressed hope that the newest EU member could inject new vitality to China's relations with Europe, the Xinhua News Agency reported.