About This Course
The intention of the course Live History: How We Created the State of Croatia is to represent, study and investigate how the Republic of Croatia was established. Students will be represented with the first-hand experience of the personas who participated in the process.
The course is focused on the time period between 1990 and 1995 – the period of history when our home was built from foundations, when we protected it from ruin.
As the authors Michel Cazenave and Roland Auguet suggest in their work ˝ Les Empereurs Fous˝ (French for crazy emperors), we have to be dreamt about in order to be born. Children are the offspring of parents’ dreams and their impulse to survive. Such is the case with the Croatian state.
On the one hand, the born child – Republic of Croatia, was loved, dreamt about and passionately desired. It was the result of the lust for our own state.
On the other hand, the child was unwanted: primarily the Serbs didn’t want it (or her – our loved one, as Marijan Ban sings), as well as other advocates of the international status quo in which Croats had no proper country.
If we compare it to the process of construction, one could say that the Republic of Croatia was illegally constructed, but we wanted to legalize it under a reasonable cost: by asking for the international recognition from as many nations as possible, including the organisation United Nations.
The professors appearing throughout the course Live History: How We Created the State of Croatia, and myself as the lecturer have to meet the following condition: we had to actively dream, conceive, give birth and raise our Croatia.
Course Staff
Slaven Letica
Slaven Letica, a college professor, economist, politician and a publicist, was born in 28 July 1947 in Latište, a village near Podgora. He was educated in health economics and medical sociology at the universities in Edinburgh and Leeds, but he proceeded building his career at the School of Medicine, University of Zagreb.
The public recognizes him as dr. Franjo Tuđman’s first personal assistant, the duty served from May 1990 until March 1991.
Slaven Letica is the author and co-author of sixteen works in science and popular science published in Croatia and the United States, including more than a hundred scientific and professional papers.
He is married to Gordana Cerjan-Letica, a sociologist and an associate professor at the School of Dental Medicine in Zagreb. They have two sons. Bartol, born in 1976, graduated international relations and political science from Yale. Frane, born in 1982, graduated from the Faculty of Law in Zagreb, and is a successful lawyer.
