Twenty Years On

How is Croatia celebrating this twentieth anniversary of her UDI? By preparing to join the EU.

It is almost comical. The Germans' unilateral recognition of the independence of the old Hapsburg provinces of Slovenia and Croatia proved as catastrophic as any previous intervention in East European affairs in the cause of Greater Germany. With Slovenia already in, Croatia's accession would have brought the wretched process to its conclusion. But just when Croatia wants in, Germany wants out.

Could the EU benefit from the witness of Antemurale Christianitatis? In principle, of course. But that would be an extremely difficult witness to bear, even if natural allies are more and more strident from Poland to the Vendée via Bavaria. It would much better have been borne within and through what the world had insisted was a preserved Yugoslavia, perhaps with the monarchy restored, and certainly drawing on an historical identity as a bulwark against all of Stalinism, decadent pseudo-Western capitalism, Nazism, and that last's Islamist and ethno-separatist allies.

As much as anything else, that would have been an awful lot better for those who are now the extremely beleaguered Croats of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The largest act of ethnic cleansing in the Yugoslav Wars would never have happened, that of the Serbs from Croatia, where the Constitution had previously recognised them as one of the two constituent peoples. The Holocaust-denying, Gypsy-baiting old monster, Franjo Tudjman, would never have been able to recreate in the 1990s the full panoply of Fascism on the borders of Austria and Italy. Nor could he have engaged in the supremely crooked privatisations that ruined the Croatian economy and set the tone for Croatia's endemic corruption. And the blasphemous cult of Medjugorje would never have taken off.