Greater Croatia
Greater Croatia ( Croatian Velika Hrvatska ) describes a theoretical state structure that was striven for by some nationalist groups in Croatian history and is still a political goal of the right-wing Croatian Party of Law (HSP) today.
All Croatians are to be united in an independent state that includes all Croatian settlement areas (including the minority areas). There were different views as to which population groups should be counted among the Croats based on their origin, religion or language.
In part, the intention to annex areas to Croatia beyond the current borders of the Republic of Croatia is seen as an attempt to establish a "Greater Croatia". The International Criminal Court for the Former Yugoslavia charged high-ranking politicians and the military who are said to have tried to incorporate the Croatian settlement areas in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Bosnian War (1992–1995) in order to achieve the goal of “a“ Greater Croatia ”within the borders of the Banish Croatia ”.
A competing project that affects largely the same territories is the idea of Greater Serbia .
history
Emergence
The political idea of a Greater Croatia emerged at the time of nation building in the 19th century .
The politician Ante Starčević (1823–1896, HSP) adapted the political concept of a Croatian nation or a Croatian people. The people of Greater Croatia (e.g. Croatia , Bosnia and Herzegovina , Slovenia ) belong to the nation of Croatians . Since only the Croatian nation could exist in this area, which was viewed as historically Croatian, Serbs and other peoples were not recognized or viewed as Orthodox or Muslim Croats.
Trialism
At the same time, Croatian Yugoslavists demanded an autonomous South Slav kingdom as the third entity alongside Austria and Hungary within the Habsburg Monarchy . Emperor Franz Joseph I (1830–1916) and his heir to the throne Franz Ferdinand (1863–1914) rejected this “ trialist ” or “Greater Croatian” solution. The southern Slavs, who were scattered across different parts of the empire, were also no longer granted rights, so that more and more nationally active Croatians turned away from the monarchy.
Second World War
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In 1939, the partially autonomous Banschaft Croatia was created within the Kingdom of Yugoslavia . The aim was to defuse the Croatian-Serbian conflict and thus the political stabilization of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia after the Serbian-Croatian settlement through the Sporazum Cvetković - Maček . The Croatian Banschaft was formed from the predominantly Croatian- inhabited areas of various Royal Yugoslavian Banships, including the Croatian majority areas in Bosnia and Herzegovina . It existed until the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was broken up and the Independent State of Croatia was founded in 1941.
During the Second World War , the radical Ustasha was unable to achieve its Greater Croatian goal, namely “the restoration of the free and independent Croatian state in the entire historical and ethnically closed area of the Croatian people”, in 1941 through the Independent State of Croatia (until 1945) . The declared area of this state was “only” parts of today's Croatia (without Istria and until 1943 without parts of Dalmatia ), all of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Serbian part of Syrmia .
Disintegration of Yugoslavia
At the beginning of the Croatian and Bosnian wars in the early 1990s, the Croatian Defense Forces (HOS), the paramilitary arm of the HSP, fought for the defense and conquest of Croatian territories and the establishment of a Greater Croatia. The areas in Bosnia-Herzegovina , most of which were populated by Croats , were merged into a de facto regime . On November 18, 1991, the Croatian Herceg-Bosna Community was founded and described itself as the "political, cultural and economic administrative unit of the Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina ". After the presentation of the (later rejected) Owen Stoltenberg Plan , a confederation model of Bosnia and Herzegovina, it was proclaimed on August 28, 1993 by its President Mate Boban to form the Croatian Republic of Herceg-Bosna with 30 districts and claimed the status of an autonomous state within the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina , with the intention of a later annexation to the Republic of Croatia .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Peter Davies, Derek Lynch: The Routledge Companion to Fascism and the Far Right . 2002, ISBN 0-415-21495-5 , pp. 295 .
- ^ Friedrich Jäger: The International Tribunal on War Crimes in the Former Yugoslavia: Claim and Reality (= political science . Volume 107 ). LIT Verlag Münster, 2005, ISBN 978-3-8258-8400-0 , p. 111 f . (Item 23 of the indictment against Jadranko Prlić and others of March 2, 2004).
- ^ Margret Lemberg, Hans Lemberg: Heinrich von Hanau: A son of the last Elector of Hesse: His life, his political campaign and his future cards . Marburg 2003, ISBN 3-7708-1242-5 , pp. 131 ff .
- ^ Mark Biondich: Religion and Nation in Wartime Croatia: Reflections on the Ustaša Policy of Forced Religious Conversions, 1941–1942 . In: The Slavonic and East European Review . tape 83 , no. 1 , 2005, p. 75 .
- ^ Ante Pavelić: The Croatian Question . Private print by the Institute for Border and Foreign Studies, Berlin 1941, p. 23 (Date: October 28, 1936).
- ^ Letter from Mate Boban to Franjo Tuđman ( Memento from August 15, 2018 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ http://www.worldstatesmen.org/Bosnia.html
- ↑ Foundation of the Croatian Republic of Herceg-Bosna ( Memento from August 15, 2018 in the Internet Archive )