The Clash of Serbian and Croatian Nationalism: the Wars of the 1990s
Abstract
The supranational ideology of Yugoslavism failed to displace either Croatian or Serbian nationalism after 1945, and the clash between them contributed to the collapse of communist Yugoslavia at the beginning of 1990s.
Slovenia was the first to leave the federation without any problems, but with Croatia the issue was more complicated, as it had a huge Serb minority. Tudjman's Croatian Democratic Union, which came to power after the first free elections in 1990, was a representative of the extreme nationalism - it claimed not just independence, but wanted the new Croatian state to incorporate all Croatian ethnic territories, including parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Its’ nationalism was ethnic, according to which the local Serbs were excluded from the Croatian political nation and subjected to discrimination. In response to their secession and the creation of the “Republika Srpska”, Croatia declared its independence on June 25, 1991. With the influx of Serbian volunteers from Serbia and the intervention of the Yugoslav army, the civil war broke out at the interstate level between Serbia and Croatia. The Serbs occupied one third of the territory of the Republic of Croatia. With the military operations "Lightning" (in Western Slavonia) and "Storm" (in Krajina) in the summer of 1995, the Croatian army regained its control of the occupied territories.
Croatian and Serbian national programs also clashed on the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and a protracted and bloody military conflict erupted there (1992-1995). Both Serbs and Croats created their own quasi-states, which immediately sought to join the mother- country. The war officially ended with the Dayton Peace Treaty in the fall of 1995.
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