Croatia: A Nation Forged in War

by Marcus Tanner

Release Date: December, 1998

Edition: Paperback

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Good intoduction to Croatian history

A book that needs to be read, if only for the shedding of light on Croatian history, which for too long was hidden or re- written by others. Putting aside his conclusions to the recent war, which seem to arose most criticism, he has written an even handed history of Croatia since early times, although sometimes he fails to place Croatia in its historical context, as a small nation in the greater general upheavals of Europe. Even so, Tanner has relied on many varied sources, not just myths created since the Second World War by both Western and East European historians, which many Western historians are now acknowledging as myths, half tuths or deceptions, of which Tanner is one.

A Good Overview of Croatia's History

By his own account, British journalist Marcus Tanner did not set out to write a history of Croatia from the seventh century. He intended to write an account of the recent war with the Serbs. However he found he could not do so without locating the seeds of the conflict in the 1940s, which are rooted in the politics of the 1920s, which were engendered by the nationalism of the 1840s, and so on. What he ultimately produced is a useful 300-page overview of Croatian history. And he still managed to write about the recent war, devoting 80 pages to events since 1990.

The common view that Tanner is not sufficiently critical of unsavory elements in Croatia's past is justified. His discussion of the horrors of the World War II-era Jasenovac concentration camp is cursory; he comments on the main political football - the debate about the numbers and identities of the victims - but fails to describe the political context surrounding the camp or the lives of the people within it. His praise for Tudjman as a noble, if overzealous, nationalist who successfully steered his country to the fruition of the 'thousand-year-dream' is insufficiently honest about his neo-fascist and sometimes nonsensical policies. Today Tudjman's HDZ party is a quasi-democratic regime rooted in corruption and repression. The war is over, the Croats won. Now is the time for nurturing democratic institutions.

From a journalist with such a tactile understanding of the region, "Croatia" includes few of the primary source interviews and observations that were so interesting and enlightening in other recent books about the Balkans by British journalists (Misha Glenny, Laura Silber). Instead Tanner weaves together secondary sources and analyses by other experts. While this approach sacrifices visceral understanding, it allows him to explain fluidly centuries of tangled events. This ultimately proves to be the work's strongest feature.

Tanner compresses dense material into smooth prose where each paragraph fairly begs for its own chapter of elucidation. Readers may not come away with a deep feeling for what makes a Croat tick, but they will certainly come away with a broad knowledge of the historical underpinnings of today's twisted conflicts. Tanner has something of a pro-Croat perspective, but this is not disastrous. Careful readers seeking understanding still rely on multiple sources with varied viewpoints. But for all the dilettantes who throw up their hands and mutter about "historical hatreds" and "centuries of fighting", there is no longer any excuse for ignorance.

A nitpick: the book's maps are a failure. The few maps are haphazard and only loosely correspond to the events in the nearby text. Many locations whose importance Tanner carefully explains appear nowhere on the maps. Perhaps a good editor can remedy this in the next edition.