Q: Why didn’t the government of Croatia organise a referendum on the country's accession to NATO? A: So that the nation wouldn’t commit treason.

The joke made up by this author is intended to make it easier to understand the frightening decision by the Croatian parliament last week. It is frightening, because it was adopted with such consensual decisiveness that it must have frozen the blood of every free spirited observer. All the deputies in the Parliament voted in favour of Croatia's accession to NATO - except one, an independent deputy Dragutin Lesar. Such an electoral result (more than 99 per cent) matches even the brightest examples of well known liberal democracies, such as the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, or Robert Mugabe in his better days, or even of Enver Hodxa while he still cared about the parliamentary life of Albania. Perhaps only Dragutin Lesar suffered minor mental anguish. As far as this author, a citizen of Croatia, is concerned, Lesar should be given the honorary status of a national hero, but the national hero status has long ago stopped being something that people decide on. And so has everything else. Given that all statistics published so far show that less than half of Croatia's citizens support the entry of their country into NATO, the unanimous decision of the parliamentary deputies – who acted as if they had already been drafted into some field unit of the military alliance, in other words not voting but expressing their opinion by answering to a command – deserves some blasphemous name, for example “liberal-democratic fascism”. But that would be an exaggeration. No fascist elements can be find in the North-Atlantic Alliance: it only serves as the praetorian guard of the most powerful countries of the world, an armed military force aimed at imposing its system of values on the rest of humanity - under the symbol of crossed swords that irresistibly reminds of swastika and political ideology that Claudio Battistelli described as the “SS ideology: Security and Stability”. If we attempt to define what is NATO, than it would sound like this: NATO is a military mammoth which - after the fall of communism and the disappearance of the Soviet military block – has no other goal but to invent new global enemies in order to fulfill its lost purpose. The more devoid of meaning it becomes, the more it tries to present itself as necessary and the more intense is the security panic and neurosis it spreads. The situation is perverse enough to be attractive to local political leaders so that Croatia has already proudly joined the machinery. Croatia has become like a limping foot soldier in a special forces unit; a volunteer that will serve as cannon fodder in future peace-keeping operations. Nobody is going to touch us any more, roared the Prime Minister Ivo Sanader at the special parliamentary session, because “NATO represents a first-class guarantee of peace, stability and democracy in the world”. A peace that is being forged by amassing nuclear warheads, planned bombing and preventive war interventions. This logic is suited for leaders of Sanader's kind. Translated into the language of national interests: We will be sending our armed boys to rogue countries to fight in wars so we can have peace! But why then do the majority of Croatia’s citizens so stubbornly oppose their country’s entry into NATO. And what in that same context does the absolute loyalty of their representatives to the western military brotherhood mean? No case of such disparity between the will of the political class and the wishes of the so-called masses has been recorded so far, which is why it deserves the title of a “school example of democracy”: it is a democracy in which a group of teachers decide on what happens to the hordes of unruly pupils, only in this case an inconvenient circumstance is that it was the pupils who elected the teachers. “You cannot expect us to decide in your name if you don't even know your names”, the political elite seems to be saying to their beloved citizens. Confiding to the editor of the Slobodna Dalmacija daily on the eve of the triumphant speech in the parliament, the Croatian Prime Minister stressed that the path to NATO wasn’t rosy. “Remember that only a year ago the leading opposition party asked for a referendum. If we had agreed to it, we would be nowhere today.” This kind of honesty borders stupidity, which is why it comes as a sort of relief. But then, where are we today? Today we are in good hands, of course. We are in good hands thanks to elections being the formal way for verifying political power. What Sanader actually says is: Imagine the catastrophe that would have befallen us if we really represented the will and the interests of those who elected us to represent their will and their interests! The masks have come off: level of political success corresponds to the level of betrayal of the electorate, and the very purpose of politics is to prevent those who legitimised the political class from participating in the decision making processes. To tell the truth, the will of the people is sometimes truly pathetic, but those who came to power thanks to the majority are the last ones who should be making categorical statements about that same majority. In any case we are dealing here with an interesting phenomenon - the government is afraid of its own citizens, which is why its reactions to their inconvenient behaviour are necessarily anti-citizen, anti-democratic, and anti-national. However, the government is not the only one concerned that the nation might fail to realize its national destiny, which is why the official guardians of national interests must be appointed. Croatia is probably the only country in the world where the so-called civil society organisations came out and supported the open pro-NATO propaganda, even though similar organisations in other countries usually advocate demilitarisation and dissolution of the Alliance. Last year, with funding from the US Embassy, several such organizations launched a campaign with the motto “Better Alliance than War!” the purpose of which was to substitute the referendum with an educational public debate. The president of the Institute for Democracy, Andrea Feldman, then uttered a truly original thought: “What we want to achieve is that, regardless of whether there will be a referendum or not, every Croatian citizen knows the answer to it.” Why should Croatian citizens know the answer to the question that nobody is going to ask them? That is the secret of democracy, in other words procedural cynicism: the citizens are required to know what to choose when they don't have the right to vote and be able to give their opinion when nobody asks them anything. So Croatia will, thanks to the joint efforts of its democratic institutions and contrary to the wishes of its citizens, hang another rifle on its shoulder, put on a masked helmet and become a limping soldier on the frontline of the world order. Using this peculiar decision making process the political class has managed to salvage the people from subversive actions of itself and in the process preserve state independence, only recently forged in blood and glory, by hiding under the wing of the big and powerful, where national autonomy will be reduced to the appropriate level of military salutation. That is the urge of ripe nationalism: independence and sovereignty have to be glorified as strongly as we intend to surrender them. But nationalism is nothing else but a collection of fateful empty phrases with the taste of blood and soil. There is nothing unusual in the fact that those who fear people most are those who most often invoke people and swear allegiance to it. Flattering the people is a reliable sign of antinational aspirations. The political leaders’ mouths are full of people because that is the kind of people that suits them best: properly chewed. Original article: Demokracija na djelu Translated by Aleksej Šćira and Tena Erceg Edited by Nick Buxton

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Viktor Ivančić was co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Croatian satirical weekly Feral Tribune (closed in 2008) that was linked to Eurotopia project.