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The problem of the influence of the Europeanisation process on party systems became a “hit” at international conferences in European studies and political sciences just after the “big‑bang” EU enlargement in 2004. Although in the last ten years this research has often encompassed the party systems of many Central and Eastern European countries, it still seldom includes the post‑Yugoslav states. On the other hand, although some scholars had assumed that the EU’s impact on party politics (including both political and organisational changes) in the new member states would be greater than in the old EU countries (EU‑15), in general their assumptions have not been confirmed. Of course we can find exceptions, though, and in the author's opinion one of these is the Serbian party system. In the first part of the paper the author deals with conceptualisation of the Europeanisation of political parties, examining theoretical problems above all connected with the question of how we should measure the significance of the influence of Europeanisation on domestic party politics. The second part of the article is devoted to the problem of Europeanisation of Serbian and Croatian parties as well as the party systems in both investigated countries. To examine this question, four of the five elements (leaving aside government‑party relations) of Ladrech's approach to the Europeanisation of national parties will be used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first half of the 20th century, the connection between ethnology and politics in Croatia was exceptionally strong. Ethnology has become a tool to build national cohesion, and the main discourse is sought in the authentic aspects of Croatian culture, which could distinguish it in particular from Serbian or, in general, from Yugoslav culture. The central category of discourse, both ethnologic as well as the political, is the concept of source. A key theorist and activist who developed the concept of authentic Croatian cultural sources, and entered it in the political agenda, was Antun Radić. Together with his brother Stjepan, he founded the peasant party, which after 1918 became the Croats' main political force. The Radić brothers pointed out that only folklore preserves cultural purity, and thus peasants should be the source of the resurgence in Croatian identity. During the short lifetime of the Croatian Banovina (1939-1941), this policy and its accompanying ideas became the official ideology, marked by the extraordinary influence of ethnology. This paper points out the dangerous aspects of the idea of source, related to the concept of closed, exclusive culture exposed to arbitrary purification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]