Abstract
The first decade of Croatia’s independent statehood was one of perpetual change.1 There was first a transition from communism to postcommunism and from Yugoslavia to former-Yugoslavia, marked by violence and constant threat. The second transition was from a state of war to one of peacetime authoritarianism. Towards the end of the century the legitimacy of the regime of President Franjo Tuđman began to wane amid corruption scandals, illiberal governance and an ailing economy. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Croatia entered its third transitional stage when the electorate ousted the ruling HDZ (Croatian Democratic Union), electing in its place a centre-left coalition government headed by the former reformist communist leader Ivica Racan. The people of Croatia also rejected Mate Granic, the HDZ’s nomination to succeed the late President Tudman. Stipe Mesic, who had defected from the HDZ in 1993 in protest at its policy towards Bosnia and Hercegovina, and in particular at its support of the secessionist Bosnian Croats, was elected as President. This new government is attempting to bring Croatia up to western standards of democracy and respect for human rights, and in May 2000 Croatia was admitted to NATO’s Partnership for Peace (PfP) programme.
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Notes
Špegelj was formerly a General in the JNA. For details of the clandestine arms procurement and the JNA’s exposure of it see L. Silber and A. Little, The Death of Yugoslavia (London: Penguin, for the BBC, 1995) 124–6.
O. Žunec, ‘Democracy in the “Fog of War”: Civil Military Relations in Croatia’, in C. Danopoulos and D. Zirker (eds), Civil-Military Relations in the Soviet and Yugoslav Successor States (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996) 219.
I owe this point to Tim Edmunds. See S. Huntington, The Soldier and the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967).
See J.B. Allcock, Explaining Yugoslavia (London: Hurst, 2000) 270.
R. Kolkowicz, The Soviet Military and the Communist Party (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967) 92
See T. J. Colton, Commissars, Commanders, and Civilian Authority. The Structure of Soviet Military Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979) 3.
D. R. Herspring, ‘Samuel Huntington and Communist Civil-Military Relations’, Armed Porces and Society, 25 (4), 1999, 569.
According to some seasoned OSCE election monitors, the 2000 elections in Croatia were the fairest they had ever monitored. Author’s interview with Anthony London, OSCE monitor, Nova Gradiška, Croatia. On the state’s manipulation of the media throughout the 1990s see M. Thompson, Forging War: The Media in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Hercegovina (Luton: University of Luton Press, 1999).
See V. Meier, Yugoslavia: A History of its Demise, trans. S. Ramet (London: Routledge, 1999) 160–6.
There are still no exact figures on this. According to Z. Tomac — a former member of the government and presidential candidate — the Italian and Hungarian contributions to Croatia’s armed forces were proportional to their size of the population. See Z. Tomac, The Struggle for the Croatian State (Zagreb: Profikon, 1993), pp. 273–94. This calculation was supported by Nenad Klapcic, parliamentary secretary for the Istrian Democratic Assembly (IDS), in an interview with the author. Between them, the Italian and Hungarian communities make up around 1 per cent of the total Croatian population.
See S. Žuljic, ‘National Minorities in the Republic of Croatia’ Geojournal, 38, 1996, 426.
On the relationship between military legitimation and state legitimacy see J. Gow, Legitimacy and the Military: The Yugoslav Crisis (London: Pinter, 1992).
See, E. Norman, ‘Croatia’s Special Police’, Jane’s Intelligence Review, 7 (7), 1994, 291–3.
See M. Tanner, Croatia: A Nation Forged in War (London: Yale University Press, 1997) 264–7,
and L. Cohen, ‘Embattled Democracy: Postcommunist Croatia in Transition’, in K. Dawisha and B. Parrott (eds), Politics, Power, and the Struggle for Democracy in South-East Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 95–7
See B. Vankovska-Cvetkovska, ‘Between the Past and the Future: Civil-Military Relations in the Balkans’, Südosteuropa, 48, 1999, 37.
See T. Ripley, Operation Deliberate Force: The UN and NATO Campaign in Bosnia 1995 (Lancaster: CDISS, 1999) 320.
Jožo Radoš, interviewed by Zoran Kuovac, Jane’s Geopolitical, 12 April 2000.
T. Ripley, ‘Croatia’s Strategic Situation’, Jane’s Intelligence Review, 7 (1), 1995, 29.
For a first-hand account of life with the HVO see J. MacPhee, The Silent Cry: One Man’s Fight for Croatia in the Bosnian War (Manchester: Empire Publications, 2000).
See B. Schonfelder, ‘Croatia: Between Reform and Post-Communist Populism’, Communist Economies and Economic Transformation, 5 (3), 1993, 319;
and E. Kraft and W. J. George, The Structure of the Banking System in Croatia (Zagreb: Hrvatska Narodna Banka, Survey No. 3, 1993), 1.
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Bellamy, A.J. (2002). ‘Like Drunken Geese in the Fog’: Developing Democratic Control of Armed Forces in Croatia. In: Cottey, A., Edmunds, T., Forster, A. (eds) Democratic Control of the Military in Postcommunist Europe. One Europe or Several?. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403905239_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403905239_10
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