Croatia

Part of Yugoslavia during the long reign of King Tito the First of Sovietica, it has been someone else's monopoly for so long that it now seems incapable of breaking the habit.

It passed the go of independence in 1991, went directly to war, and did not stop. The first war lasted four years, with Serbs across the border holding the railway stations, the line of blue and green streets on one side of the board and most of the utilities, while the rest were in the personal hands of a rather nasty little fascist named Fanjou Tudjman. Mercifully (though mercilessly would have been more his style) he died in 1999, after which the constitution was rewritten to limit Presidential powers; but of course this also increased the authority of the corrupt politicians who sit in Parliament, most of whom are financed by criminal organisations and simply function as their stooges.

The rest of Yugoslavia (Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia) was meanwhile playing its own version of the same game, now retitled The Balkans War, and involving a political equivalent of Big Brother, in which each country had to make the case for the leaders of the other countries to land on the "Go To Jail" square, or at least to be sent to The Hague as war criminals, so that their country could be the last one left standing, and resume the game of Monopoly of Yugoslavia.

Croatia joined the European Community in 2010, which means that tourists can once again take holidays in Dubrovnik and Zagreb and enjoy Crotian wines, though what other gains anyone has made from this expansion is difficult to determine. I have included the European Union in this book; it does not include a formal essay on "how the lessons of imperialism and colonialism failed to be learned", but it could very easily be supplemented.

Marks For: 5 (I have no idea why I have given it five, but I felt the need to give someone a decent mark and it happened to be Croatia)

Marks Against: 8

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