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Yugoslavia Croats
The Croats, a people with long-frustrated national ambitions,
have seen themselves for decades as cultured West Europeans
shackled to the backward Balkans. Yugoslavia's second most
numerous ethnic group, the Croats accounted for 75.1 percent of
Croatia's population, 18.4 percent of Bosnia and Hercegovina's,
1.4 percent of Montenegro's, 2.9 percent of Slovenia's, 0.6
percent of Serbia's, and 5.4 percent of Vojvodina's, according to
the 1981 census. Small enclaves of Croats were as far removed as
Kosovo and Romania. As the 1990s began, however, the Republic of
Croatia anticipated radical changes in its relations with the
rest of Yugoslavia that might result in the first independent
Croatian state since medieval times.
The Croats enjoyed their own medieval kingdom for several
centuries before a long period of Hungarian rule from 1102 to
1918. Most Croats lived under Hungarian kings until 1526 and
under Habsburg monarchs thereafter; the Croats of Bosnia and
Hercegovina and Slavonia lived under Ottoman rule for several
hundred years; and the Croats of Dalmatia passed from Hungarian
to Venetian to Austrian rule. With the help of Roman Catholic
clerics, the Croats maintained a strong collective memory of
their former statehood despite their centuries of foreign
domination. Two pivotal events in the Croats' social development
were the birth of modern Croatian national sentiment after a
brief period of Napoleonic rule in the early nineteenth century
and the emancipation of the serfs in 1848. Writers, scholars,
merchants, and wealthy landowners led the Croatian national
movement, which was triggered by resistance to Hungary's drive to
impose Magyar (the national language of Hungary) as the language
of public life in Croatia in the mid-nineteenth century
(see The Croats and Their Territories
, ch. 1).
Before the 1848 revolution, the Croats' social structure was
rigidly stratified. The peasantry consisted of serfs bound to the
land, semi-serfs who held land on condition of labor and other
dues, and landless peasant-nobles. At the end of the nineteenth
century, only a very small proportion of Croatia's total
population was employed in industry. The landowner class kept the
peasants uneducated to ensure easy exploitation. Among the
peasants in Croatia, traditional extended families gradually gave
way to individual family farms after the abolition of serfdom in
1848, but rural overpopulation and land fragmentation brought
hunger to many areas by the turn of the century. During the late
1800s, many Croats emigrated to the Americas and Australia.
After 1868 Croatian nationalists actively protested Hungary's
Magyarization campaigns; later, between the world wars, they
spoke against Serbian hegemony and for a loose Yugoslav
federation or complete independence for Croatia. During World War
II, Hitler established a puppet fascist regime, run by the
terrorist
Ustase (see Glossary), to rule a greater Croatian state
whose population was roughly half Serb. Substantial numbers of
Croatian nationalists and clergy took part in this regime. The
Ustase were vehemently Roman Catholic, anti-Serb, and
anti-Semitic; their avowed policy was to obliterate the Serbs
from their territory by conversion, deportation, or execution.
The regime closed all Serbian Orthodox primary schools, outlawed
the Cyrillic alphabet, and ordered Serbs to wear colored arm
bands.
After 1945, Yugoslavia's Communist regime worked to snuff out
manifestations of Croatian nationalism wherever they appeared,
labeling advocates of Croatian national interests as
"neo-Ustase." But in the 1970s and 1980s, Croatia remained the
second most prosperous Yugoslav republic. National aspirations in
the early 1970s, reached a brief peak in what was called the
Croatian Spring, but their threat to the federation caused Tito
to crack down severely in 1972. In 1990 the sweeping victory of
Franjo Tudjman's anticommunist Croatian Democratic Union in the
republican parliamentary elections brought a new rush of Croatian
nationalism. Croats campaigned to distinguish Croatian as a
separate language, and new Slavic-root words were introduced to
replace words borrowed from foreign languages. Old Croatian
national symbols reappeared, and in October 1989, a statue of
revolutionary patriot Josip Jelacic was restored to Zagreb's
central square, 42 years after its removal by federal
authorities.
Data as of December 1990
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