The EU and Interculturality in Croatia after 2000

Abstract

Colloquially, the wars that led to the dissolution of Yugoslavia (between 1991 and 1995 in the western part of the country and 1999 in Serbia) are seen as the result of an upsurge of atavistic ethnic hatreds, which for decades slumbered below the fragile surface of the Yugoslav political and social order. However, more convincing is the argument that they had an entirely ‘European’ and even a modern and rational function of creating culturally and/or ethnically homogeneous nation-states instead of sustaining the traditional coexistence, communication, mixing and symbiosis of various groups with rather ambiguous and unstable ‘identities’. The function of these wars was to separate the communities by various kinds of ‘ethnic cleansing’, to draw territorial borders between them, and to solidify their particular ‘national identities’.¹ This argument is all the more convincing as in Europe in general and in the European Union (EU) in particular, nationalism, although in rather domesticated forms, is still stronger than the feeling of belonging to a common European political formation and the conviction of possessing a citoyenneté européenne — European citizenship.²