Croatia is the European Union’s newest member, but it, along with many other European nations is shifting politically toward the far right. In fact, Croatia has a “strong-willed fascist in its new cabinet – one who makes the right-wingers in power in Hungary and Poland look like wimps.” Respect for minority rights was a key condition for Croatia’s entry into the EU in 2013, but once Croatia gained entry, it is being reversed, and there is hardly anything that Brussels can do.
Zlatko Hasanbegovic, a 42-year-old historian who became culture minister when the new government was installed in late January, has been a prominent figure in a small ultra-rightist party that speaks positively of the World War II-era Ustasha movement. Though downplaying of the Ustasha’s war crimes has been around for years, it has now penetrated cabinet ministers and the mainstream media. Hasanbegovic is working to rehabilitate the Ustasha’s ideals.
Similar to other rightist movements in many parts of Europe and Scandinavia, Croatia is restoring nationalism. While Hungary and Poland are eviscerating their states’ democratic structures and erecting more autocratic forms of government, Croatian nationalists are waging a political culture war, for now. But they are laying the groundwork for an eventual assault on Croatia’s liberal democracy too.
Hasanbegovic’s philosophy is steeped in the bloody history of the Balkans, and it has disturbing implications today. The Ustasha movement, which came to power in the spring of 1941, became a puppet of the Third Reich. It was also closely allied to the powerful Roman Catholic Church, which supported the short-lived regime. The Ustasha went about the business of murdering more than 377,000 Jews, Serbs, and Roma (Gypsies) so cruelly that it prompted objections from even the German SS.
The ranks of the far right in Croatia are so well stocked that it managed to get 5,000 supporters to march in the streets of Zagreb in January, some of them chanting Ustasha slogans. They lack vision for the future, while still nursing wounds of the past. And that past is “a very, very dark past.”
Since Hasanbegovic took office, he has “done nothing to blunt his radicalism…” He wasted no time restoring nationalist culture to prominence.
He has deprived small independent media and civil society groups of state funding, pushed out critical voices in public television, and many programs have been given a starkly nationalist slant. He has also praised the “documentary” film Jasenovac: The Truth. Jasenovac was a World War II concentration camp during Croatia’s alliance with Nazi Germany in the 1940s. The film claims that Jasenovac was not a death camp, but merely a concentration camp, and that only between 20,000 and 40,000 victims perished there instead of the 100,000 that mainstream historians cite.
Hasanbegovic has never given up this dream of a greater Croatia, and claims that he never will. Zagreb is flexing its muscles in the region by blocking the path of its old foe Serbia into the EU by “refusing to endorse the EU’s otherwise unanimous recommendation to open talks with Serbia…” Expect more trouble in the Balkans.
A cooperation agreement between the traditionally very liberal philosophy faculty and the Catholic theological faculty, prompted protests from students at Zagreb University because it was seen as an attempt to “boost the influence of the Church, which is considered a symbol of national identity.”
“It would be a step towards further weakening of secularity in Croatia,” said Iva, 20, a sociology student.
The reaction to the EU’s so-called “progressive” forces has arrived. Nationalistic movements are now rising all over Europe. Croatia may not have enough clout to follow in the footsteps of the “epidemic of nationalism” in Hungary and Poland, but they are looking to the future. Poland and Croatia are strongly Roman Catholic countries. Hungary has a large Roman Catholic cross-section of its population. What is likely to emerge in Croatia is a resurgent and fanatical Roman Catholic nationalism, which could lead to persecution of non-Catholics.
While globalism starts out “progressive” with optimistic ideals of unity and inclusiveness of all religions, cultures and peoples under a single global government, maintaining that trajectory is difficult as old religious and cultural prejudices and hostilities undermine its sustainability. Fanatical rulers can easily use globalized power structures to bring in the final one-world religion.
“And in her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth.” Revelation 18:24