Geoadria, Vol. 25 No. 2, 2020.
Review article
https://doi.org/10.15291/geoadria.3074
A contribution to the study of the Croatian-Serbian border dispute in the Croatian Danube region – historical, geographical and contemporary aspects
Branimir Vukosav
; University of Zadar, Department of Geography, Zadar, Croatia
Zvonimir Matijević
orcid.org/0000-0002-1596-0886
; Nova Gradiška Gymnasium, Nova Gradiška, Croatia
Abstract
The centuries-long existence of Croatian lands in different political and geographical frameworks, as well as their border position between civilizational and culturally diverse and often opposing political and territorial units, have conditioned the process of very dynamic political, territorial and demographic changes that gradually shaped the borders of the modern Republic of Croatia. The area of the Croatian Danube region with the country’s eastern national border to Serbia, has not been exempt from such historical and geographical dynamism. The genesis of the Croatian national border in this area is mostly recent, but its emergence in 1945 as the republic border between Croatia and Serbia within the newly established socialist Yugoslavia was indirectly conditioned by the historical and geographical processes that preceded it. With the independence of the Republic of Croatia and other republics of the former Yugoslavia, a number of open border and territorial disputes created by the change of the republic's borders to national ones occurred. The above mentioned eastern national border of Croatia is among such disputed areas. Its northern segment which is related to the stream of the Danube river became an object of Croatian territorial dispute, firstly with FR Yugoslavia and afterwards with its successor Serbia, mostly due to the opposing geographic and legal interpretations concerning borderline, and the fact that the precise delineation was not conducted during the time of socialist Yugoslavia. The actual border dispute between Croatia and Serbia in the Danube river region is contextualized in the paper through a historical and geographical analysis of the border’s genesis. A review of historical and geographical facts, as well as a valorisation of both countries’ views on the matter of the disputed border segments are used to reach relevant conclusions regarding the dispute in question.
Keywords
Croatian Danube region; borders; Danube; historical and geographical development; border dispute
Hrčak ID:
249039
URI
Publication date:
26.12.2020.
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