Eurasia Press & News
Close to half of Slovenians, some 47.5 percent, do not want to see their neighbour and fellow ex-Yugoslav Croatia join the European Union, according to a Median poll published in the Croatian weekly Globus.
According to the telephone poll conducted from January 8 to 12 on a sample of 712 Slovenian citizens, some 36.8 percent of Slovenes support Zagreb’s EU bid. Only 48.2 percent would vote at a referendum on Croatia’s EU entry, with 31 percent saying that they definitely would not.
Seen as the most pragmatic and modern of all the republics of the former Yugoslavia, the two countries were close in the early 1990s, when both voted to leave the socialist federation. But in recent years their relations have deteriorated, with each side taking frequent swipes at the other over historical and political issues..
The stakes were mostly recently raised by Croatian President Stjepan Mesic, who said that if the Croats had not liberated Istra and the Slovenian coastline in 1945, Slovenia would today be looking at the sea from 20 km away.
This statement triggered an angry reaction in Slovenia, particularly in local historical circles. Slovenian historians said that the 60,000-strong Fourth Army units that liberated those parts of the former Yugoslavia contained 40,000 Croats, but 10,000 Serbs too, and that Slovenian units had helped liberate that territory, but that what was more important was that army had been a united army with a single mission.
According to Slovenian historian Joze Prijevec, if you were to look at things from Mesic’s angle, the Croats should then ask themselves whether they should not thank the Serbs for saving them from Islam, and defending them from Austro-Hungary and the claims of other countries in 1918.
Faced with inflammatory rhetoric on both sides, one group of Croatian and Slovenian historians have called for a truce in the war of words.
Nonetheless, the view of certain Croatian analysts is that Slovenia will continue to block Croatia’s EU entry until 2015 by using its veto, the groundwork for which has been under preparation for some months now.
Croatian Foreign Minister Gordan Jandrokovic, for his part, does not believe that any referendum will be held, as it would lead to Croatia’s EU path being blocked.
