When Americans think of Eastern Europe, I believe there are a lot of characteristics we impose on the countries here: wild lands of unfiltered cigarettes, communist-era architecture and a general fascination with all things Western.
Upon arriving in Zagreb, the capital of the young republic Croatia, I was expecting to find all these symptoms of "Eastern" Europe. And over the course of my first few days in this city, I did find a lot. Cigarette smoke filled the airport terminal as I passed easily through customs. On the drive into town, I passed Mammoth, a massive communist-era apartment complex that dominates the skyline of Novi Zagreb. American music played in all the bars and dubbed American films played on all five of the country's television stations. But as I began to understand more about Croatia as a country and Croats as a people, I saw the error of my ways.
Croatians don't talk about the East and the West. For them, Croatia is a part of Europe, not a country in the prison of post-communism. The rhetoric of East and West isn't a part of the conversation here because it perpetuates a dichotomy of conflict that hasn't existed in the region since the collapse of the Soviet Union. But for Western Europeans and Americans, this conflict is convenient. It offers a simple explanation for a political history that is anything but simple.
President Clinton saw the power of this explanation in 1999 when NATO was drumming up support for military intervention in Kosovo, where ethnic Albanians were fighting the Serb minority. He described Kosovo as a "small country" surrounded by "other small countries," Croatia included. The Balkan Peninsula, according to Clinton and his cohorts, was a fault line between the East and West, a flash point for ethnic conflict and ancient hatreds. It was, for all intents and purposes, the Wild West. But for the citizens of Croatia, their country is just like any other in Europe.
One of the first Croatians I met was Marina, the head librarian of a foreign language library in the city's main square. In her library, the shelves contain a blend of French, Italian, German, Russian, Spanish, English and Croatian literature. As the books mix amicably in the stacks, Marina has trouble visualizing a divide between her native Croatian and the non-Slavic languages of the West. Indeed, there is no "West" to her, just other places where books are written. A recent video chat with New York City librarians reinforced her opinion that a country like America is just an Internet connection away, not a difficult journey through the hinterlands of what Clinton described as a fracture zone.
John, my host-sister Vana's godfather, is of a similar mind. Over coffee, he and I discussed, among other things, Croatia's relationship with the European community. For John, EU membership is just another community for the Croats to join. And after 900 years of being members of one community or another, in relationships that were far from reciprocal, John doesn't believe that Croatia has much to gain. It is better for his country to be independent rather than join the West, just as it was better for Yugoslavia to be independent rather than join the East and the USSR.
Croats have seen themselves in many relationships where their national identity was lost in a larger state. The Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy, the Kingdom of Serbs and most recently Yugoslavia all applied some adjective to this place that does not adequately define it, just as a term like "Eastern" fails to represent the culture here. It is only since 1991 that the people of Croatia have been able to define themselves as they wish.
Ultimately for John, Marina and everyone else I have met here, Croatia's future does not lie under some preconceived notion of what is Eastern, Western, or any other direction on the compass rose. For now at least, after 900 years of being part of one direction or the other, Croatia is just Croatia, and that is enough for everyone.
