Zivila Hrvatska: The Intersection of Croatian National Identity and EU Membership

On January 22, 2012, the Republic of Croatia via popular referendum became the twenty-eighth, and to this date final nation to vote to ascend to membership within the European Union (EU). The historical significance of this event, and the problems that it poses for political scientists, ought not to be minimized. The common wisdom within the discipline of political science concerning nationalism is that its chief goal is to estabilsh sovereignty for the nation in the form of a politically-legitimate entity, i.e. the modern nation-state. However, Croatia's ascension to the European Union greatly problematizes this assumption, as European integration was at the forefront of the agenda of its first, and ardently nationalistic, government. Nationalism is fundamentally an ideology rooted in identity, and the answer as to why Croatian nationalists were so willing to forfeit sovereignty for the sake of European integration is equally grounded in national identity. This paper will seek to explore the way that Croatian national identity was socially constructed to the point where European integration was not seen as a forfeiture of Croatian identity, but in fact the logical extension of it, i.e. the way in which a Croatian identity was imagined to be inextricably a European one as well. To this effect, this paper will examine the mult-facetness of the develoment of Croatian national identity, specifically the roles that historical narratives of statehood, religion, language, collective memory, ethnosymbolism, and exclusion or "othering" of various other identities all played in said formation.