71 MARTINDALE CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF PRIVATE ENTERPRISE Attracting tourists, displacing heritage: Croatia’s postwar recovery in Dubrovnik Avery McGarry After the Homeland War ended in Croatia, the government turned its attention to rebuilding Croatia’s public-facing image—especially in locales such as Dubrovnik—to regain the economic stimulus of tourism. However, it failed to properly plan for the eventual overtourism, lacking strategies for heritage management, visitor limits, and community preservation. Inadequate war acknowledgments, coupled with the influx of tourism, have had an adverse effect on the area’s cultural heritage. Introduction After the Homeland War separated the Republic of Croatia from Yugoslavia in 1995, Croatian towns such as Dubrovnik were left in shards. Buildings were burned and shattered by shelling and citizen communities traumatized. Beyond the physical damage, the war damaged Dubrovnik’s economy, as it relied heavily on tourism. International tourists deemed the area not safe. Thus, Croatia rapidly turned toward restoring tourism by rebuilding architecture and, more essentially, its image to the outside world. Croatia rapidly rebuilt Dubrovnik’s tangible heritage—its walls, rooftops, and medieval architecture—but neglected the intangible heritage of memory, community, and identity that gives those structures meaning. In doing so, Croatia rushed past addressing its cultural heritage, negating a main purpose of the Homeland War. One purpose of the war was to create an independent Croatia—a nation with its own cultural identity. After the war, Croatia refocused, aiming to reposition cities like Dubrovnik alongside Western European destinations to lure tourists back. These efforts worked, and now Croatia is a highly favorable destination. Tourism contributes an estimated 25% of Croatia’s GDP, the highest share in the EU (World Travel and Tourism Council, 2023). An unfortunate consequence, however, is that these areas now struggle with overtourism, an issue that makes it harder for Croatians to afford living there and in turn, harder to create community. Thus, Croatia’s move to reconstitute tourism effectively exacerbated the traumatic experience of the Homeland War, injuring cultural heritage in the process. To explore this hypothesis, this article develops a case study of the Old City of Dubrovnik, a UNESCO World Heritage Site on the southern tip of Croatia. The city was victim to an eight-month siege during the conflict and is a tourist hub. This intersection of heavy conflict and heavy tourism makes Dubrovnik a uniquely rich place to study. The lasting impacts of the war and the rebuilding strategy can be seen today; for instance, skyrocketing housing costs are practically impossible for Croatian citizens to afford. This erosion of connections to place and historical memory undermines the very identity that independence was meant to protect. The issue is not tourism itself, rather the combination of failing to commemorate the war and overtourism’s effect on cultural heritage. The same short-term, revenue-driven thinking that erased the war from tourist brochures inhibited long-term planning for developing an infrastructure to manage tourism once marketing worked. Background The collective republic that would come to be known as Yugoslavia formed after World War I, containing Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Macedonia (Banac, 1984). It remained intact for decades, but some of its nations, in particular Croatia and Slovenia, wanted more ethnically condensed states separate from socialist Yugoslavia. In 1991, both countries declared independence, triggering the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) to invade both (Tanner, 1997). While Slovenia’s war lasted only 10 days, Croatia’s was much longer, approximately four years, through 1995. The conflict is now known as the Homeland War or the Croatian War of Independence. In 1995, Croatia launched two offensives that ended the war, Operation Flash and Operation Storm, giving rise to Croatia as an independent republic. Even though it won and gained indoi:10.18275/pbe-v044-010
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