Wednesday 3811

Today we visited the Croatian presidential compound, speaking to a chief foreign policy analyst, these are my notes

Croatian Presidential Palace/office

Built in 1960s as one of the residences and workplacees of Tito. During the initial monts of the war, this building was not the original presidential workplace, the presidential seat was in the center of Zagreb, however when this facility was bombed during the war, Tudjman moved the seat here.

He spoke about the architecture and decor of the building, the building is new and modern, however is filled with older traditional folkish artwork, and he thinks that the art should be changed to more modern stuff, to indicate how new Croatia is, despite its ancient heritage, in that this new Croatia is ready for new challenges.

Chief foreign policy analyst
(Croatia recognizes Kosovo)
(Croatia will likely encourage (Bosnia and Herzegovina [BiH] and Serbia joining the EU if Croatia does, because it does not want to be the border security for the EU at large)

Croatia exists in a Europe that is fraught with ideas of globalization and coexistance, where multinational NGOs have lots of power (EU), but here the worst genocides took place in all of recent history.

Many Europeans forget that there have been numerous conflicts, and examples of very ugly nationalist, secessionist, seperatist, revolutionary movements within Europe.

There are many examples of countries/peoples that have gone through times of extreme tumult, and within that framework, The Balkans are not all that unique, however it must be acknowledged that the Balkans are in a better position than they were 100 years ago.

While the Balkans, and Croatia especially, is trying to move on, and forget about the past, knowing that it is not productive to dwell on the conflict, it is difficult, there are still many people missing, and emotional and physical scars are deep.

Over the past century, the people of the region have learned to never trust the state, as every state will betray you at a crucial time, your taxes; may very well be used to finance the army, which will undermine your civil liberties, and restrict your rights.

However, todays Croatia is trying to earn/gain the trust of the people.

Transformation for Croatia was 5 fold

Economic, state to private, led to corruption and favoritism while
establishing capitalist elites from politicians friends

Political, democratic, while it was mostly democratic, there was still only one party in power for 17 of the last 20 years of independence

Statehood, establishing an efficient state, abolishing or consolidation of parallel structures, or reform of inefficient or redundant structures

Identity, geography and history makes a contiguous identity difficult

War-peace, this includes transitional justice, should we insist on remembering and getting justice for the past, or should we forget about it? ICTY was a good thing to have to encourage this transition with repsect to transitional justice. Accession to the EU has also helped to expedite this transition.

Many people believe that joining the EU is the end of the transition phase of independence, they see it as a movement towards sovereignty.

The speaker believes that joining the EU is best for Croatia and Croatians, it means military protection for the country, solidarity; and receiving of funds from the more developed countries of the union, and freedoms; mostly of movement of people and goods, and progressivism; the EU is seen as a superbloc of progressive states, and by joining this progressivism would envelope Croatia as well.

Speaker believes that there should be more optimism about BiH, because there has been peace from the last 15 yrs. Also nationalist issues should be dropped, while developmental issues should be the focus. BiH is not unworkable.

We also met with a language expert

Leksikografski Zavod Miroslav Krleza

The institute was founded in the 1950s, by the most important modern Croatian writer, Miroslav.

The speaker put the Balkan conflicts of the last hundred years into a social/linguistic framework, and compared it to other identity conflicts of the same kind, such as that or Scandanavia in the 1900s or Spain nowadays.

he was very interesting, and i liked how he put the language politics into context, and the long standing conflict over the issue, i love the whole historical anthropological explanations for todays conflicts, so i found this fascinating.

We also wandered around Zagreb, and stumbled into a cool Catholic church from the 1100s.

so yeah that was cool, reminded me why i like Catholicism, cause i havent found any other places of worship that as thoroughly induce the fear of god with its oppressive, opulant, ostentatiousness.

so yeah that was today now ima sleep