Croatia: a History from Revolution to Independence, Robin Harris, školska knjiga, £38

Friedrich Engels – the philosopher, industrialist, socialist revolutionary and close companion of Karl Marx – could not disguise his contempt for Croats. Writing in January 1849, Engels condemned them for their ‘almost nomadic barbarism’ and chided this troublesome southern Slavic people as the ‘standard bearers of Counter-Revolution’. He consoled himself, however, that the Croats’ destiny would be their complete ‘disappearance from the face of the earth’ in a coming World War.

Engels wrote these scathing remarks in the wake of the 1848 Revolutions – the chain reaction of uprisings, insurrections and revolts that shook thrones and ancien régimes across the European continent. The Croatians had played out their own drama in 1848, but as conservative supporters of the established order. Croatia’s revolution began with an expression of national aspirations: a Croatian Sabor (parliament) was convened and elected Count Josip Jalačić – a Croat from Bužim – as its Ban (viceroy). Ban Jelačić advocated for greater Croat autonomy within the multi-ethnic patchwork of the Habsburg Empire. Yet when push came to shove, the Ban’s armies also fought loyally under the Habsburgs’ imperial banner against rebellious Hungarian forces, and then assisted in suppressing a revolutionary uprising in Vienna.

As elsewhere, the euphoria of 1848 quickly turned into disappointment and disenchantment. Jelačić’s loyalty went unrewarded by his Habsburg overlords, and his achievements proved to be fragile. After order was restored, the Hungarians, not the Croats, became indispensable allies of the emperors in Vienna. As the empire suffered military defeats – at the hands of the French in 1859 and the Prussians in 1866 – and contracted, the Habsburgs cleaved to the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy to perpetuate their rule. Accordingly, Vienna pandered to Hungarian interests at the expense of demands for greater Croat autonomy within the empire. The first stirrings of Croatian nationalism were, for the time being, smothered, and would only resurface after the fall of Austria-Hungary in 1918.

The dramatic events of 1848 and their aftermath provide the opening act for Robin Harris’ vast and impressive new tome – Croatia: a History from Revolution to Independence. Providing a comprehensive overview of the major developments in Croatian history from 1848 to the mid-1990s, it charts Croatians’ turbulent path to national independence, through revolution, war, occupation, and under dictatorships of royalist, fascist and communist varieties.

For Harris, who now lives in Zagreb as a naturalised Croatian citizen, this book has undoubtedly been a labour of love. Yet it is also an extraordinary feat of scholarship built upon the author’s own extensive and original research, which draws upon a wealth of secondary and archival sources. Harris sets a new standard for histories of southeastern Europe and the Balkans. His Croatia: a History is a tour de force from an historian who has devoted himself to telling Croatia’s national story, and the Croats’ quest for a state of their own.

As with many other peoples in the Balkans, Croats have, for much of their recent history, been a part of other peoples’ empires. Harris handles this with care and consistency. He is not unsympathetic to the Habsburg Empire, under which Croatia enjoyed decades of stability and economic development, even as he emphasises that Croatian national aspirations were frustrated.

This frustration continued after the end of the First World War, as Croatia passed out from the defunct Habsburg Empire and became a constituent part of the first Yugoslavia. Towards the end of the conflict, and during the Paris Peace Conference, Croatian national leaders sought to build a Yugoslavia in which Croats, Slovenes, Serbs and other Southern Slavs could share as equals.

Their hopes, however, would be dashed, as the victorious powers lent their support for a Serb-dominated union, partly to reward Serbia’s leaders for picking the winning side in the First World War. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes declared in December 1918 unified the Southern Slavs under the Serbian Karaðorðević monarchy. The constitution of the new kingdom, issued in 1921, ‘was… a Serbian Constitution for what was a predominantly Serbian State’. Serbs were disproportionately represented in the bureaucracy, the police and the army.

Matters got worse for Croats when, in 1929, Aleksandar I of Yugoslavia proclaimed a dictatorship and abolished all political parties. This was largely a move to head off the electoral power of Croatian national and Serbian liberal political parties. The international response to this royal coup was mute. As the spectre of communism began to loom over Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, governments in Great Britain and France perceived the Serb-centric Yugoslav Kingdom as an essential bulwark against the spread of communist revolution. Not for the last time, western powers sought to prioritise the stability of Yugoslavia, and turned a blind eye to the union’s unequal character.

The Serb ascendancy ultimately destabilised the first Yugoslavia, which was plagued by political assassinations. In 1928, a Serb nationalist linked to the Serbian political elite attempted to assassinate Stjepan Radić, the de facto Croatian national leader, in the Yugoslav parliament. Radić survived, but died soon after from a fever caused by his infected wounds. Vengeance came swiftly, in January 1929, when King Aleksandar was assassinated in Marseille. His assassin, a Bulgarian-Macedonian, was trained and supported by a Croatian revolutionary nationalist movement – the Ustaše (literally, ‘insurgents’). They had developed under the protection of Benito Mussolini, who sought to use them in order to realise his territorial designs on the Dalmatian coast.

The Ustaše, described by Mussolini as a ‘useless and dangerous mob’, were installed in power in Zagreb in 1941 and an independent Croatia was proclaimed. This came after overwhelming pressure from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy forced Yugoslavia to join the war on their side. The Ustaša leader, Ante Pavelić, proved to be a subservient, dependent and dependable client. He readily fell in line with the genocidal policies of Hitler’s Germany, and used bands of brutal thugs to maintain order. Croats were nominally in control of an independent Croatian state, but they were firmly under the boot of their German and Italian masters, who plundered Croatia for the raw materials they needed to pursue their war effort.

As the Second World War progressed, another Croat would lead the resistance to Pavelić’s neo-fascist government. Josip Broz, better known as Marshal Tito, commanded an effective partisan insurgency campaign against the Ustaše. Tito, a masterful politician, had courted Stalin in Moscow, and had won his support as the leader of Yugoslavia’s communist movement. By 1945, he was also recognised, albeit begrudgingly, by Winston Churchill and the British as the de facto leader of a reconstituted, postwar Yugoslav state. By presenting himself to Churchill as a pragmatist in command of a broad national resistance movement, and by sounding the right noises on democracy and federalism, Tito was able to present himself as the only figure who could restore order and stability to war-torn Yugoslavia.

Tito proceeded to outmanoeuvre his rivals for control of the second Yugoslavia. In this way, he quickly imposed a communist system, complete with single-party rule, tight censorship, the liquidation of political opponents and the creation of a vast secret-state apparatus. Thus, Croatians shifted in 1945 ‘from one kind of repression to another’, from the ‘chaotic’ totalitarianism of Pavelić and the Ustaše to the ‘orderly’ one of Tito and his communists.

For all its differences to the prewar order, the second, communist Yugoslavia replicated many of the injustices of the first. As Harris makes clear, its greatest failure was its inability ‘to solve the national question’ within Yugoslavia itself. Serbs continued to dominate the state and the army. Croats were, in relative terms, economically disadvantaged. While Tito flirted with a limited Croatian glasnost, in the form of the Croatian Spring of 1967-1971, he ultimately clamped down hard on expressions of Croatian nationalism. In repressing the Spring, Tito sent in police from Yugoslavia’s other republics to restore order in Croatia and dissolved Matica hrvatska – an independent Croatian association playing a role akin to Poland’s Solidarność.

The failures of communist Yugoslavia ultimately created the conditions for the violent breakup of the state through war, Harris contends. The Yugoslav state ‘never achieved legitimacy’, and, after Tito’s death in 1980, the system was slowly eroded by the rise of a vitriolic nationalism emanating from Belgrade. In the absence of Tito and amid the Soviet collapse of 1989-91, the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) attempted first to keep the federation together by force. When this failed, it then tried to create a Greater Serbia through territorial conquest. The stage was set for the Balkans’ 1990s, a dark decade of civil war, ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Harris demonstrates that the Croatians, under the leadership of Franjo Tuðman, did not choose conflict with Serbia and the JNA. Rather, they were forced into a war of defence against Serbian aggression. In April 1990, Tuðman and his Croatian Democratic Union had overwhelmingly won elections for the Croatian Sabor. The Croatian constitution, proclaimed in December 1990, provided equal rights to Serbs, as well as all other minorities, living within Croatia. Throughout 1990, Tuðman and his allies stated their willingness to co-exist with other republics in a loose, confederal Yugoslav state. The Serb leadership under Slobodan Milošević, however, would only accept a close union under Serbian dominance.

In 1991, Croatians had to fight for their independence. After suffering a fierce onslaught from Serb forces supported by the JNA, in which more than 300,000 Croats and other non-Serbs were expelled from their homes or forced to flee, Croatia went on the counter-attack. National independence was declared in June 1991 and in October all remaining ties with Yugoslavia were severed. Following a ceasefire signed in January 1992, independent Croatia was belatedly recognised by the European Community, the United States and the United Nations.

With international recognition, Croatia’s long road to national independence had come to an end. To be sure, further challenges loomed on the horizon, but Croats at last had their own state. To give Harris the final word: ‘The Croatian Republic is stable and secure. And its future lies in the hands of Croats.’