On Nationalism in Croatia and Former Yugoslavia

Growing up in small-town Western Australia, my exposure to Croatia and the former Yugoslavia was minuscule. Like most things, my first memories are through sports: specifically the players with Croatian and Serbian ancestry playing for the Socceroos, Australia’s men’s soccer team. They were the ones with the funny sounding last names, at least to our Anglo-centric ears, with names like “Viduka”, once our main striker.

Otherwise, the main memory I have relating to the region is doing a class project on the war impacting civilians in Bosnia and Herzegovina in second grade. I made a poster on a pin-up board, sticking on pictures and text with glue, describing the innocent children there. Our teacher tried to impart upon us how these were normal kids just like us, going through a very sad experience. 

Despite these occasional encounters with the region—a Croatian friend from high school, some Serbian democracy activists who I saw speak during college, gorgeous beach images of Croatia—I remained largely ignorant of the region. Although no longer the Communist east or front page news like during the war in the nineties, it remained the “Other Europe” in my imagination, meaning the non-Western or Northern one, which I associated with modernity, romance and trendy cafes. Like the “Stans” of Central Asia, the region’s geography was vague and cloudy in my mind.

So it was with few preconceptions that l reacted when a couple of friends suggested Croatia as a potential trip destination. As is my way, I began to do some background reading on the country through travel blogs, Rick Steves and the Lonely Planet - I was struck by how oddly shaped Croatia is (based on war, not natural features), and by the region’s horrifically violent and tumultuous history. This, paired with the idyllic sea and fascinating Roman fortified cities, made for an intriguing mix.

Having carved out 12 days for the solo trip (my friends ended up not being able to join), I crafted an itinerary solely in Dalmatia, southern Croatia. I flew into Split, then took ferries for stops in Hvar, Korcula, and Mjlet islands, before ending in Dubrovnik, with a brief day trip to Mostar in Herzegovina.

My main takeaway from this trip is how much I take for granted, as someone who has spent most of his life in Australia and the US. Speaking with locals, I was reminded how different things are, as well as some of the things we’ve lost along the way. 

Here are three of the biggest differences I noticed:

1. National identity

In the US, I have never felt like my Chinese blood or atheist beliefs made me any less American than, say, a white Christian. And while I’m sure there are still some conservatives who would feel otherwise, I think the majority of Americans at this point would agree that being American is not tied exclusively to a particular race or religion. Indeed, this multicultural nationality is a fundamental part of our conception of what America is.

In Croatia and other former Yugoslav countries, national identity remains a lot more closely tied to race and religion. For Croats (Catholic), Serbs (Orthodox) and Bosniaks (Muslim), religion is essentially the only difference between them. To me this sounded so small-minded, so tribal, so stuck in the past. It was difficult to reconcile this with Croatia’s seeming modernized Western identity - with English shows on TV, fast internet and well-dressed locals, walking around Split felt not that different from anywhere in Western Europe. I was curious how fixed young people were to traditional notions of national identity.

“Can a Croat be something other than Catholic?”, I asked my tour guide Dino.

“That’s a good question,” he replied and thought about it for a moment. “If we were to change our religion…let’s just say that grandma won’t be happy!”

In Mostar in Bosnia & Herzegovina, I asked my Bosniak tour guide Alma if mixed-religion marriages, which the city had the highest percentage of in all of Yugoslavia, were happening again.

“Not really,” she acknowledged. “We younger people will hang out with friends from other religions, but no dating or marrying.”

Finally, on the drive to the Dubrovnik airport, my Uber driver Marko explained why most young Croats remained religious and would not marry a  non-Croat, or at most, only a fellow Catholic. He’d mentioned how a lot of Serbs from Belgrade work in Dubrovnik’s kitchens, where they can earn more money than back home, and that they avoided talking about the war.

“We fought so long and hard to have our own nation, so we have to preserve our identity. To be Croatian means being Catholic - otherwise what’s the difference between us?”

All of this makes sense to me, in an old-fashioned, tribal sort of way. The scars of the last war remain fresh. But as a new world immigrant, if we still must belong to nations—in spirit and on our passports—I’m sure glad my two have a broader conception of identity that admits any race and religion.

2. Family & Staying Put

In Croatia, family and community still plays an important role in most locals’ sense of self and lifestyle. While some young Croatians are moving to the big city of Zagreb or other countries seeking more opportunity, most stay in their hometown, the same place their families have lived for generations. They eat at home as a family, live with their parents post-marriage and keep the house in the family. Your last name and relationships still play an important role in business and politics.

As an unrooted, nomadic emigrant who enjoys living in different places, my initial reaction when hearing about this is that it sounds so confining and boring. But another part of me appreciates these traditional bonds, the comfort and connection that I lost when my parents emigrated to Australia. We often blame capitalism and conflict for disrupting or weakening community and family ties. But I also think culture and identity play an important role. In the US, I often feel like individualism has supplanted communal or family-based values. And so we deal with different kinds of societal problems, such as an epidemic of loneliness. I’m not sure which way is better overall - in my regular life I swing constantly between my primal urge for individual freedom and yearning for a stronger and deeper community.

3. Nostalgia

In Croatia, I was told that about half of the population preferred life in Yugoslavia, particularly among those who lived through it. My tour guide in Hvar belongs to this group.

“People were happier,” Dale (pronounced “Dah-lay”) told me. “Everyone had a house, a job, vacations...”

“We didn’t feel like we had to move to London or New York,” said the museum worker at the Red Museum in Dubrovnik, which provides a refreshingly balanced perspective on life in socialist Yugoslavia. “People felt like they lived in the center of the action. We weren’t economically wealthy, but we were rich in terms of pop culture.”

He mentioned that you still hear a lot of Yugoslav era pop songs on Croatian radio today. One of my favorite sections of the museum features albums from Yugoslav musicians in the 70s and 80s, including a punk band that sounded like a Sex Pistols ripoff. For all of its authoritarianism and other serious problems, Yugoslavia was a big country, with a passport that enabled travel to both the west and east (to the USSR). Home ownership was high, education was free and overall quality of life was relatively high. This was particularly apparent during my day trip through Herzegovina, whose industry and middle class has never recovered since the war.

When we think of nostalgia in the US these days, it’s often associated with socially conservatives or MAGA. In Croatia and other parts of former Yugoslavia, the nostalgia is for a certain kind of state-based progressivism that their post-war economies—rife with political corruption and controlled by moguls who acquired their holdings during the post-independence land grab—struggle to provide. That is why so many young people, particularly in countries like Bosnia, have already left.

“We have a local joke: there are more Bosnians living in Germany than there are Germans”, Alma said.

In such a beautiful place, having spent some time enjoying the highlights of Dalmatia, I hope that things continue to improve for the people of this region.