Overview

The newly independent republic of Croatia is located on the Balkan peninsula in southeastern Europe. Throughout much of the twentieth century, Croatia was one of five republics within Yugoslavia, an amalgam of ethnicities and religions tenuously held together by dictatorship and economic feasibility.

Croatia, which runs along the Adriatic to Montenegro, has a distinctive elongated geography that is largely the result of demarcations imposed upon it throughout this century. Occupying 21,829 square miles, Croatia is bordered by Bosnia-Hercegovina on the south, by Italy on the west, by Slovenia to the north and northwest, by Hungary to the north and northeast, and by Vojvodina, a formerly autonomous Serbian province, to the east.

Croatia has a population of 5 million people, consisting of 80 percent Croats, 10 percent Serbians, about one-half percent Hungarians and Slovenians each, and even smaller groups of Czechs and Italians. Roman Catholicism is the predominant religion, followed...