Original scientific paper
CIVIC AND ETHNIC IDENTITY: THE CASE OF CROATIA
Duško Sekulić
; Flinders University of South Australia, Department of Sociology, Adelaide, Australia
Abstract
The author starts from Kuhn’s division into the western civic nationalism and the eastern ethnic nationalism as a continuum along which a population is distributed. He claims that ethnic identification cannot be analyzed outside its political context and historical circumstances. Thus after the first phase of the ethnic revival following the collapse of communism in Croatia, we have witnessed how the civic component seeped into the ethnic identification. The author claims that the commitment to the Yugoslav idea in the former Yugoslavia was a multifunctional phenomenon that served also as a means of avoiding a narrow ethnic identification. With the collapse of Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav idea in Croatia reemerged as the civic identity that replaced the ethnic identity. The difference stemmed from the modern western political discourse and penetrated the processes of identification. The civic identification was an equivalent to the Yugoslav idea as it enabled people to distance themselves from the narrow ethnic identification and the sweeping ethnic revival in Croatia’s first post-communist phase. This served as an escape from the minority status just like the former commitment to the Yugoslav idea.
Keywords
ethnic nationalism; Croatia; civic identity; Yugoslav idea; Yugoslavia; primordial identity
Hrčak ID:
23160
URI
Publication date:
26.1.2004.
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