Search

Croatia's monumental second-place finish at the 2018 FIFA World Cup represents the highest football achievement to date for the young nation. This victory, however, masks violent internal divisions between its domestic club football teams. This article examines the most salient rivalry between Dinamo Zagreb and Hajduk Split, two teams that have evolved to represent the interests of Croatia's north and south, respectively. Using interviews with radical football fans, I argue that the two teams act as reservoirs for regional identity-building while violence between their fans is a microcosm for political and economic tensions between Zagreb and Split. More importantly, this rivalry exposes the dividedness of the Croatian state, as it continues to grapple with the complexity of its radical regional identities in the wake of its independence from Yugoslavia. This article contributes to the existing body of literature on sports identity and regionalisms/nationalism as well as how sporting teams shape the geographies of belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Croatia and Serbia are two countries that started their paths toward the EU with similar conditions. Nevertheless, in 2018, the end of this study's period, the two countries are characterized by different outcomes regarding European integration. This paper puts forward one key determinant for the more successful Europeanization process of Croatia—resolved statehood problem—and claims that the unresolved statehood problem in Serbia led to higher adoption costs of EU rules. Therefore, this article seeks to improve the theorization of the relationship between Europeanization and the statehood problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a comparative study on the patterns of Euroscepticism encountered among the political parties of Croatia and Serbia. Primary attention is paid to the employment of Euroscepticism from within the halls of power by the ruling parties of Croatian Democratic Union/HDZ and the Serbian Progressive Party/SNS. Secondary attention is paid to the employment of Euroscepticism by smaller parties with a populist and/or a radical right-wing orientation. This article demonstrates that whereas Euroscepticism among Croatia's political parties appears to be rather multifaceted (with a focus on domestic minority issues, gender-related themes, and economic anxieties), the Euroscepticism of Serbian political parties has become 'single-issue' with a major stress on geopolitics. Nevertheless, the governing apparatuses of Croatia and Serbia converge in their adaptive and pragmatic employment of Euroscepticism. This consists of the occasional employment of soft versions of revisionist Euroscepticism in Croatia and a gradualist Euroscepticism, which is contested by the rejectionist voices of the radical right, in Serbia. This phenomenon demarcates the tactical and situationally adaptive adjustments of HDZ and SNS from the more ideological and pervasive dominance of socially conservative agendas among ruling parties of the conservative right in the Visegrad Four states (e.g. FIDESZ and PiS). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To determine the efficiency of regional and local government public functions, the most used method in the empirical analysis is data envelopment analysis. This paper reviews 20 counties as part of regional government units in Croatia as well as the relationship between efficiency scores and exogenous determinants in the 2009-2016 period. The results of our analysis show that, among exogenous determinants, only the annual registered unemployed rate and annual average wage for full time jobs are statistically significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years the phenomenon of populism has inspired many debates and many doubts. Despite the growing scholarly interest, it still means different things to different researchers. In the first part of the article the author briefly presents the issues related to the phenomenon of populism itself and its relationship with democracy, and examines the creation of parties that researchers label populist. The second part is a case study that analyses the sources of populism, its manifestations and its importance in Serbia and Croatia over the last century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From a perspective rooted in intellectual and cultural history, the author accounts for the profound disciplinary transformations undergone by ethnology as practised at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research (IEF) in Zagreb, Croatia, during the early 1990s. In a context shaped by the Yugoslav breakup and the outbreak of war, and also as a result of theoretical transformations that had taken place in Croatian ethnology during the previous decade, many researchers at this institute undertook a new ethnological practice that involved among other things the questioning of the notion of objectivity and the redefinition of the political role of the ethnologist. The author analyses these changes in terms of converging factors, namely the theoretical influences coming from American, French, and German scholarship, the disciplinary crisis caused by a self-perception of social marginality, and the radical and violent sociopolitical transformations of the early 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Trabajos y Comunicaciones is the property of Universidad Nacional de La Plata and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The topic of this paper is framing of collective, national identities in commemorative speeches. It identifies abstract conceptions of Croatian national identity articulated by political elites during commemorative practices and examines what patterns are used for their linguistic expression. The questions that are posed are how Croatian nation and national identity are framed in discourse and whether constructs of national identity are formed depending on the context and on the party political affiliation of the speaker. However, the aim is also to track potential changes in elite narratives over time. The analysis is based on a corpus of commemorative speeches delivered by Croatia's political elites on the occasion of celebration of the Croatian army victory in a military operation. The main focus is on the conceptual and linguistic analysis of the collective identities and sociocultural concepts in the staged communication during commemoration rituals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Društvena Istraživanja is the property of Institute of Social Sciences Ivo Pilar and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Društvena Istraživanja is the property of Institute of Social Sciences Ivo Pilar and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Društvena Istraživanja is the property of Institute of Social Sciences Ivo Pilar and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The paper researches effects of local government revenue structure on income growth and employment in Croatia. The results confirm highly positive and significant effects of personal income taxation. This differs dramatically from the previous research based on central government level, which show that property and consumptions taxes are growth-friendly. The most probable explanation of such results could be in narrow revenue structure defined by the vertical fiscal equalisation and the fact that particular local revenue structure does not affect competitiveness in the same way as overall revenue structure of the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Europeanisation is a process whereby EU institutions and policies influence national institutions and policies within the various Member States. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether the Croatian public procurement reform in 2011 was caused by the European Union, domestic variables or by diffusion and interdependence of both. The paper argues that the Croatian public procurement reform was caused by diffusion and interdependence between both the European Union and national institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Teorija in Praksa is the property of Teorija in Praksa and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Croatian & Comparative Public Administration is the property of Institut za Javnu Upravu and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Teorija in Praksa is the property of Teorija in Praksa and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper discusses the way in which a post-conflict European Union (EU) member immediately after accession both shapes and adapts to EU memory politics as a part of its Europeanization process. I will analyze how the country responds to the top-down pressures of Europeanization in the domestic politics of memory by making proactive attempts at exporting its own politics of memory (discourses, policies, and practices) to the EU level. Drawing evidence from Croatian EU accession, I will consider how Croatian members of the European Parliament “upload” domestic memory politics to the EU level, particularly to the European Parliament. Based on the analysis of elite interviews, discourses, parliamentary duties, agenda-setting, and decision-making of Croatian MEPs from 2013 to 2016, I argue that the parliament serves both as a locus for confirmation of European identity through promotion of countries’ EU memory credentials and as a new forum for affirmation of national identity. The preservation of the “Homeland War” narrative (1991–1995) and of the “sacredness” of Vukovar as a Europeanlieu de mémoireclearly influences the decision-making of Croatian MEPs, motivating inter-group support for policy building and remembrance practices that bridge domestic political differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Collected Papers of Zagreb Law Faculty / Zbornik Pravnog Fakulteta u Zagrebu is the property of Sveuciliste u Zagrebu, Pravni Fakultet and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

That matters of the state must always be resolved before democratization seems to be a fairly common position in the scholarly literature. There are, however, also scholars that stress the importance of an alternative perspective: ‘no democracy, no state’. This article seeks to contribute to a better understanding of this very important issue, advocating the need for a more nuanced argument about the relationship between the state and democracy. To do so, Croatia and Serbia serve as empirical examples as their different outcomes regarding the consolidation of democracy are explained as due to their (un)resolved stateness problem. The article uses process tracing to explain these outcomes and attempts to craft a minimally sufficient explanation of the outcomes by developing causal mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The "Uljanik" shipyard in Pula (Croatia) is one of the few resilient large-scale industrial enterprises in Southeastern Europe. It withstood all political storms since its foundation in 1856 and, today, is still building ships, even at a profit. Its long existence makes it an excellent case study for the historical exploration of business and of labour relations in Southeastern Europe in a longue durée perspective. Thanks to its importance, the shipyard provides a fruitful lens into the transformation of social relations on the local level and how these interacted with wider developments (on the national and supra-national level). This article compares two periods, in which the shipyard faced the challenge to adapt to radically changing political conditions: the first post-war decade, when Istria became Yugoslav and a socialist economy was built; and the 1990s, when Croatia became independent and transformed its economy into a market-based, capitalist one. The main argument of this article is that in both periods, the enterprise pursued a successful strategy of globalisation. For that, specific coalitions between workers, managers and the state had to be formed. It appears that during socialism, keeping the Communist Party at bay was one of the reasons of success, while during the post-socialist transformation the enterprise's fate also depended on its ability to solicit support from the government. Hence, post-socialism did not mean the disappearance of the state from the economy, while socialist-time self-management had strengthened the hand of the management vis-à-vis an interventionist communist party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most scholarship on post-Communist Croatia claims that the first Croatian president, Franjo Tuđman, intentionally rehabilitated the legacy of the World War II (WWII) Croatian Ustaša and its Nazi-puppet state. The rehabilitation of the Ustaša has been linked to Tuđman’s national reconciliation politics that tended toward a particular “forgetting of the past.” The national reconciliation was conceptualized as a joint struggle of both the Croatian anti-fascist Partisan and the Croatian WWII fascist Ustaša successors to achieve Croatian independence. However, the existing scholarship does not offer a comprehensive explanation of the nexus between national reconciliation and the rehabilitation of the Ustaša. Hence, this article will present how “Ustaša-nostalgia” does not stem from Tuđman’s intentions, but rather from the morphological gap occurring in Tuđman’s nation-building idea. Namely, Tuđman’s condemnation of the entire idea of Yugoslavism and Yugoslavia eventually brought about the perception that any historical agent advocating the idea of an independent Croatia is better than any form of Croatian Yugoslavism. Finally, the article will present how contemporary Croatian society is still seeped in “Ustaša-nostalgia” due to the hesitation of the post-Tuđman Croatian politics to come to terms with the legacy of his national reconciliation politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Croatian & Comparative Public Administration is the property of Institut za Javnu Upravu and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Banatica is the property of Museum of Highland Banat and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Croatian & Comparative Public Administration is the property of Institut za Javnu Upravu and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)