Croatia

A country shaped like a crescent around Bosnia, with a coastline it fought two wars to keep. Croatia was a kingdom in its own right before entering a personal union with Hungary in 1102, and it spent the next eight centuries inside other people's states - Hungarian, Venetian on the coast, Ottoman in the interior, then Habsburg, which is the origin of the Military Frontier where Serb families were settled as border soldiers against the Turks. That settlement produced the Serb minority whose position became the central question of 1991. Croatia joined Yugoslavia in 1918 and resented Serbian dominance from the start; the Ustasha puppet state of 1941 to 1945 committed mass murder at Jasenovac and elsewhere, and the memory of it poisoned every later argument. Tito, himself a Croat, suppressed the Croatian Spring of 1971. Independence declared in June 1991 brought war with the federal army and with Serb-held Krajina, the destruction of Vukovar, and the shelling of Dubrovnik; Operation Storm in 1995 retook the Krajina and drove out most of its Serb population. Croatia joined NATO in 2009 and the EU in 2013. Dalmatia's Roman and Venetian cities carry the tourist economy. Zagreb is the capital. The country has over a thousand islands. Dubrovnik was the independent Republic of Ragusa until 1808. The Croatian coastline is among the most indented in Europe. The necktie takes its name from Croatian mercenaries in French service. Croatia adopted the euro in 2023. Its territory is not contiguous by land, with the Neum corridor giving Bosnia its outlet to the sea.

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