Anti-minority moves in Croatia are symptomatic of a Europe-wide slide back to the worst nightmares of the 20th century
Imagine the following dystopian scenario. After a football game at one of the biggest stadiums in Germany, one of the players takes the microphone and shouts "Heil Hitler!". More than 30,000 people answer in one voice "Heil!". Just a few days later, 65% of Germans vote against gay people at a national referendum. At the same time, signatures are already being collected to organise another referendum – this time to ban the Yiddish language. What would you call this? Democracy?
Until now, Croatia has had only three referendums. The first was held in 1991 to declare independence from Yugoslavia, the second in 2012 on the EU accession, and the last this weekend, when 65% of Croatians voted to change the definition of marriage in the constitution to apply exclusively to "a living union of a woman and a man". Just a few days before the referendum, during Croatia's World Cup qualification celebration, footballer Joe Šimunić took a microphone on to the field and shouted to fans: "For the homeland!". The 30,000 fans responded: "Ready!" It might sound like nothing special, but he used the phrase "Za dom spremni!", an old war call used by Ustashas, the Croatian collaborators of the Nazi regime who sent tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews and others to concentration camps.
Meanwhile, a citizen's initiative – with the enthusiastic support of the Catholic church and rightwing parties – have started collecting signatures to hold a referendum on ethnic minority rights. In 1941 the Croatian pro-Nazi regime brought in a law which prohibited the Cyrillic alphabet, used by the Serbs, in the territory of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH). In September this year, plates in Cyrillic script were put at official buildings in Vukovar by the government, a city that was besieged and destroyed by Serbs during the war in 1991. But the plates were torn down by angry protesters. At the same time, the Croatian government is pursuing a law in which bilingualism is to be made compulsory in places where ethnic minorities (Italian, Serbian, etc) make up more than 30% of the population. But now, a genius came up with the idea that the threshold should be 50%, in other words, that a minority can have rights only if it's a majority!
Those behind these referendums allege that the model of the Croatian family is under threat – on the one hand, if gay people get the right to enter into marriage, and on the other, if Serbs get the right to use their own alphabet in Croatia. Yet it is the current crisis of capitalism that is truly destroying social safety nets – the gradual disappearance of a public health service and cuts to pensions are hurting the family more than gay people or Serbs. For instance, the unemployment rate among young people in Croatia is 52%, which brings us just behind Greece and Spain. And instead of organising a referendum on these problems or giving these young people jobs, Croatia spent €6.2m to define something that is already defined in family law: marriage as a legally regulated community of a woman and a man.
But it would be wrong to conclude that Croatia is now once again closer to the Balkans and conservative countries such as Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. What about the tens of thousands of protesters who marched in Paris in March 2013 opposing France's new same-sex marriage law? What about the atmosphere toward minorities in Denmark or Sweden, not to mention Italy or Greece?
What the Croatian constitutional referendum on gay rights, and the proposed one on ethnic minority rights, shows isn't only the misuse of democracy and a conservative backlash – it is actually a symptom of the rotten heart of Europe, a continent that is more and more resembling not only the dystopian scenario described above, but realising the worst nightmares of the 20th century. Not only the French Roma expulsion, the Golden Dawn in Greece, or Hungary's far-right turn, but also the rise of antisemitism in Sweden or Islamophobia in Denmark, prove that, as the Croatian poet Marko Pogačar might be right when saying "the only thing more horrible than fascism is moderate fascism".
CroatiaThe far rightEuropeGay marriageSrećko Horvattheguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds |
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