Croatia

Croatia A Balkan state which came largely under Hungarian sovereignty within Austria-Hungary in 1867. A Croatian nationalist movement began to develop in response to Hungarian efforts to ‘Magyarize’ the country through the introduction of the Hungarian culture and language. At the Corfu Pact its popular leaders agreed to a united Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, which came into existence in 1918. However, Croatians soon rejected renewed foreign domination, this time by the Serbs, who were seen to occupy the most important and privileged positions in the new state. The traditions of Catholic Croatia, whose history and culture had been tied closely to that of Venice and Austria, came into increasing conflict with the predominance of the more Eastern-oriented Serbian culture, language, and Orthodox Church, which had been historically tied to the Ottoman Empire.

Resentment led to the growth of the Ustase terrorist movement, which was responsible for the assassination of King Alexander I. When Yugoslavia was overrun by German and Italian troops in World War II, the Ustase declared the puppet Independent State of Croatia, in which it brutally persecuted, gaoled, and murdered Serbs, Jews, and other minorities. In 1945, the Fascist dictatorship of Pavelic came to an end after a brutal civil war which was won by Tito's Communist partisans. The refounded state of Yugoslavia sought to calm Croatian fears of renewed Serb dominance, and was superficially successful through a combination of constitutional guarantees and coercion. However, Croatian protests for greater liberties in the spring of 1971 were brutally suppressed.

After Tito's death, resentment against Serbian dominance grew, and came into the open after the collapse of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989, posing a fundamental challenge to the existence of the Yugoslav Communist regime. Democratic elections were held in 1990, which were won by Tudjman, who introduced liberal economic reforms and hastened his country's process towards independence from Yugoslavia, which was finally declared on 7 October 1991. This led to a bitter civil war against the Croatian Serb minority, who were helped by the Yugoslav, Serb-dominated army. The latter were principally agitated by the popular memory of Croatian aggression during World War II, and occupied around a third of the territory as a result. The civil war was shortened by the civil war in Bosnia, and in 1995 Croatian troops regained most of the territory lost to the Serbs. After the Dayton Agreement, the Croatian government continued to refuse full cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague. A number of high-profile arrests were made, however, and new evidence of Croatian human rights violations did come to light. Following Tudjman's death, elections in January 2000 led to a dramatic victory for the Social Liberal and Social Democrat alliance, and a change in government for the first time since Croatia's independence. Under Ivica Raćan of the People's Party, the new government now cooperated fully with the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. It also sought to overcome its international isolation through signing an Association agreement with the EU in order to prepare a path for an application for membership. Against protests of the nationalist opposition, the government guaranteed the integrity of the state of Bosnia-Hercegovina, and it pledged the repatriation of 200,000 Serbs to their homes in Croatia. Finally, in late 2000 Raćan's government solidified Croatia's democratic structures by introducing constitutional changes to strengthen the authority of parliament vis-à-vis the President.