Anti-Croat sentiment
discrimination or prejudice against Croats
Anti-Croat sentiment or Croatophobia (Croatian: Hrvatofobija) is discrimination or prejudice against Croats as an ethnic group, also consisting of negative feelings towards Croatia as a country. It refers to negative attitudes towards Croats and it has been historically a basis for the persecution and ethnic cleansing of ethnic Croats.
The most widely-known historical proponents of anti-Croat sentiment in the 19th- and 20th-century were the Hungarian Liberal party, Italian Fascist Party, Serbian nationalist Chetniks and Serbian Radical Party.
Serbian and Italian nationalism in the 19th century
Some of the earliest tensions between the Croatian and Serbian people were documented in the mid-19th century, during the nation-building process. Serbian Prime Minister Ilija Garašanin's Načertanije (1844), initially a secret document, claimed lands that were inhabited by Bulgarians, Macedonians, Albanians, Montenegrins, Bosniaks, Hungarians, and Croats as a part of Serbia. Garašanin's plan also included methods of spreading Serbian influence in the claimed lands. He proposed ways to influence Croats, who Garašanin regarded as "Serbs of Catholic faith." In 1901, Serbian Orthodox bishop Nikodim Milaš published the influential work Pravoslavna Dalmacija, in which he, among others, claimed that the Croatian historical lands and historical-sacral heritage were Serbian since the Early Middle Ages.
Vuk Karadžić and other early Slavists considered everyone speaking Shtokavian dialects to be ethnic Serbs. Hence, the literary and standard Croatian language and heritage, based on Shtokavian, was to be a part of the Serbian language, and all Shtokavian-speaking Croats were counted as "Catholic Serbs." Chakavian was considered by them to be the only original Croatian language, sometimes also Kajkavian which was theoretically related to the Slovenes, and sometimes none dialect (grouping Chakavian with Shtokavian as the Serbian language), reducing Croats to merely a toponym. Croatia was at the time a kingdom in the Habsburg monarchy, with Dalmatia and Istria being separate Habsburg crown lands.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Anti-Croat sentiment” as discrimination or prejudice against Croats. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as discrimination or prejudice against Croats. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1567640. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1844 and 1901.
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This entry incorporates text from “Anti-Croat sentiment” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.