Duško Sekulić

National Tolerance in the Former Yugoslavia

This article analyzes patterns of tolerance among nationalities in the former Yugoslavia. Greater tolerance among urban residents, those from nationally diverse republics, and those with nationally mixed parentage and less tolerance among religious people strongly support the modernization theory of ethnic relations. The association of unemployment with intolerance and outbreaks of violence in areas with greater national diversity support theories of ethnic competition. Factors associated with modernism produce greater tolerance but increase the possibility of ethnic conflict. Humanitys dilemma is how to preserve the benefits of modernism for increased intergroup contact and tolerance while avoiding is potentially tragic implications.

Who Were the Yugoslavs? Failed Sources of a Common Identity in the Former Yugoslavia

Yugoslavias leaders believed that a policy of equality among the many nationalities in Yugoslavia, in tandem with Communist Party hegemony, would allow nationalism within Yugoslavia to exist, mature, andfinally diminish as a political force without jeopardizing the political stability and economic development of the country as a whole. Consequently the identification of people with their nationality was accepted to the neglect of an identity associated with the state as a whole. The expectation that a shared political agenda and the modernization of the society would weaken nationalism as a political force was not met. Instead, economic and political rivalries among the Yugoslav republics intensified nationalist feelings. In the early 1990s Yugoslavias experiment in building a multinational state was replaced with open hostilities and warfare among the South Slavs. We identify four routes to Yugoslav self-identification and analyze the significance of these using survey data from 1985 and 1989, just prior to the break up of Yugoslavia. Urban residents, the young, those from nationally-mixed parentage, Communist Party members, and persons from minority nationalities in their republic were among those most likely to identify as Yugoslavs. None of these factors, however, proved sufficient to override the centrifugal forces of rising nationalism. Implications for political integration in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are discussed.

Ethnic intolerance and ethnic conflict in the dissolution of Yugoslavia

Abstract The causal link between ethnic intolerance and ethnic conflict is tested using four highly comparable data sets from Croatia that span the time before and after the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia: 1984–5, 1989–90, 1996 and 2003. Though most approaches to ethnic conflict posit a social-psychological dimension critical to violent encounters, our analysis provides an unprecedented empirical examination that dispels the commonly held view that ethnic hatred, hostility, and intolerance are the cause of ethnic conflict. After explaining the events and the shifting social, political and economic landscape that precipitated the war, we examine demographic, social structural and attitudinal changes between 1985 and 2003 that are associated with variation in ethnic intolerance, giving special attention to the connection between religiosity and intolerance. Prior to the war people were slow to translate public tensions into personal animosities. We find strong support for concluding that the events of the war itself and especially elite manipulation of public images of these events, are strongly implicated in rising intolerance during the war, and that the wars residual effect has been slow to dissipate.

WOMEN, MEN, AND THE “SECOND SHIFT” IN SOCIALIST YUGOSLAVIA

The authors examine the “second shift” in the former socialist Yugoslavia through the analysis of 1989-90 data from a random sample of 7,790 adults in the paid labor force. Despite working outside the home, women are primarily responsible for housework. Neither education, occupation, urbanization, nor participation in the informal economy has a significant effect in reducing this; only the presence of an older female in the household measurably reduces an employed womans participation in the second shift. Not only are mens attitudes important for womens performance of the second shift but also mens ability to act in terms of this value displays the significance of a gendered social structure in socialist societies.

Civic and ethnic identity: The case of Croatia

The understanding of ethnicity as primordial has prevailed among the people of the former Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav identification was always present as a more “broader” identification for those who wanted to escape the narrow ethnic identification. The main argument of the article is that with the dissolution of the Yugoslav state the new functional equivalent to the Yugoslav identification is emerging in the form of the “civic identity”. This new civic identification allows people to express their distance from the narrow ethnic identification and the intense ethnic revival characterizing the first post-communist phase. In order to empirically substantiate the argument we used the 1995 World Value Survey data from Croatia.

Nationalism, liberalism and liberal nationalism in post‐war Croatia*

. This article analyses ethnic nationalism and liberalism as expressed in the views of Croatians in the aftermath of the 1991–5 war – a war during which ethnic-nationalist rhetoric played a large role. Because the war was part of systemic change in the nation, including the adoption of more democratic and capitalist social formation, we also anticipated economic and political liberalism to be present among a sizeable portion of the population. We provide an analysis of the structural conditions fostering these sentiments, an analysis potentially applicable to a range of societies presently in transition. Based on 1996 survey interviews (N=2,202) conducted throughout Croatia, we show that ethnic nationalism in the Croatian context is more widely shared than is liberalism. The effect of religious fundamentalism, educational attainment and media exposure are as predicted, based on theories of liberalism and nationalism. Wartime experiences and position in the occupational system have a weaker and more mixed influence than hypothesised. Perhaps most importantly, we find that three out of five Croatians embrace both ethnic-national views and views that are distinctly liberal, suggesting that liberal nationalism is now dominant in Croatia. The characteristics of groups holding differing views suggest that recent events and current changes in Croatia bode positively for continued growth of liberal sentiments, but this will not necessarily be at the expense of ethnic nationalism.