A review of the historical development of the Republic of Croatia

Abstract

The Croats were among the first peoples of Europe who established a state, and from the beginning of the tenth century they had their own kingdom, the first among the Slav peoples. By their language they belong to the Indo-European Slavic, or more precisely the South Slavic group of peoples, and by their cultural and religious orientation they belong to the Western European sphere of civilization. They settled their present homeland at the beginning of the seventh century. Their formation as a distinct ethnicity began in the early Middle Ages, and this on territory which was for centuries the meeting place of Greek and Roman culture, the Frankish and Byzantine Empires, and the Holy Roman (German) and Ottoman Empires. Here the world's three greatest religions also met: Catholicism, Orthodoxy and Islam. The Croats are Catholics and have always gravitated to the West. As one of the six republics of the former Yugoslavia, Croatia was on the border between the Western democratic countries and the Eastern communist world, between the countries gathered in NATO and those in the Warsaw Pact. Since becoming an independent and democratic state in 1991, the Republic of Croatia has been on the eastern border of Central Europe.