Youth and transition in Croatia

This book – Youth on the Eve of the Third Millennium – presents the results of the empirical research Value System of Youth and Social Changes in Croatia that researchers from the Institute for Social Research in Zagreb conducted in 1999. The polling was done on a sample of 1700 young people aged 15 to 29 on the entire Croatian territory. In the interpretation of results we have compared them with the findings of the research project Position, Perceptions and Behavior of the Croatian Young Generation, conducted by the same research team in 1986 on an identically structured sample of young people. Instruments with the same indicators were used in both research projects, which enabled a valid comparison of young generations in Croatia in the observed period of time. Between 1986 and 1999 in Croatia, radical and far-reaching conversions occurred, presumed to have considerably affected the changes in the attitudes and behavioral patterns of the young. To perceive these changes more clearly, we need a reminder of Croatia in the middle 1980’s and at the end of the past century. At the time of the first research, Croatia was, along with Slovenia, the most developed republic in the former state, the Socialist Federate Republic of Yugoslavia. Its ethnic composition was relatively heterogeneous since almost a quarter of the population was not part of the majority – Croatian. The political system, like in rest of Yugoslavia, was normatively defined as self-management socialism. The ideological-political postulates this political system was based on, included, among others, the brotherhood and unity of (the constitutional) nations and ethnic groups, social ownership, workers’ self-management, socioclass conflict-free society guarantying a relatively high minimum of social rights (employment, and due to it, health and retirement insurance, and even the right to public housing), and on the monopoly of the Communist Party authority, as the working class’s „avant-garde“ and the main promoter of the J. Broz Tito’s cult. Such a totalitarian society, during the mid 1980’s, faced an economic and political crisis that constantly deepened after Tito’s withdrawal from the political arena. The disappearance of the autocratic party and state leader, who was the unquestionable political authority and arbiter for almost four decades, hastened the surfacing of, up to then, suppressed antagonisms as well as non-dogmatic ideas. It was actually a period of certain political liberalization, visible in the decreasing of ideological pressures and in questioning of the socialist project as the best possible form of social and political system for a community, but also in the escalation of national conflicts that would, in the end, bring about the disillusion of the state and a war between nations, included into the earlier federate community. At the same time, on the social plan, in spite of the growing economic crisis and the gradual increase of the unemployment rate, the wider strata of the population still had a guarantied minimum of social rights, relatively solid health care and equal chances for education, even though the social differences, hidden before, now grew more pronounced. Social promotion became more and more the result of educational achievements, and less of the so-called moral-political suitability, but at the same time, different informal relationships, as a direct transfer from the traditional into a (half) modern society, played a permanently important role. The young were still being socialized as the ones who will continue the mapped out social and political development, and characterized by the slow reaching of socio-economic autonomy – mostly as a result of unemployment and impossibility of solving their housing problem – and ever greater distancing from the ruling ideology and politics. The openness of Yugoslavia then, enabled the young to gain a direct insight into the way of life in the developed European environment, which additionally convinced them of the deficits in the society and system they were living in. Indeed, the young were the social group that, at the end of the 1980’s, showed the greatest deviation from the proclaimed values and the official politics, as well as the greatest readiness to accept radical social changes. A succession of expected changes occurred soon after, making the image of Croatia at the beginning of 1999 quite different from the one thirteen years ago. Thus, at the end of the 1990’s Croatia is an independent state where over nine tenths of the population are members of the majority nation. The society is recovering rather slowly from the effects of the war, which ended in the middle of the decade. A new political system has been established, nominally based on liberal-democratic values, which, among others, implies the acceptance and development of market economy, political pluralism and tolerance, and respect for human and minority rights. In reality, though, what dominated was the idea and practice of creating of an ethnically homogenous state, enhanced by the promotion of national integration and revitalization of traditionalist values, representing the opposite of what the socialist system symbolized, and joined by economic deterioration. On the political level, in spite of the institutionally installed multi-party system, there persisted an almost ten-year long monopoly of authority by one political party and its authoritarian leader as the founder and president of the state. Under that political patronage, a nationalization of social ownership was conducted, afterwards privatized with numerous malfeasances, which had almost transformed into a model. The effects of ownership privatization and of economy restructuring were devastating, because they brought about a considerable fall in the standard of the widest strata of the population, a mass loss of employment and an enormous deepening of the social inequalities. Along with the rhetoric about the fulfillment of the liberal-market conception of society, the former social security was demolished, the social rights were considerably reduced, the quality of health care worsened and the education of children coming from the socially deprived strata aggravated. The insufficient democratization of the Croatian society and some dubious military operations, especially in the neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina, resulted in the noticeable international isolation of Croatia. Due to all these circumstances and processes, the comparative advantages Croatia had at the beginning of the transitional process, had irrevocably disappeared, and the country found itself at the bottom of the list of the transitional countries’ compared by the (un) successfulness of the transformation. Thus, it is no surprise that at the end of the 1990’s, most Croatian citizens, including the young ones, expected new social changes and were prepared for them. How the social and political transformations in the 1990’s reflected on the contemporary Croatian youth, is what our research findings state. The following recapitulation of the results will indicate the most important trends. For starters, we need to point out the fact that the young think youth lasts up to 29 years of age, but they differentiate into those that are youth-centric and those that are adult-centric oriented. The youth-centric direction has only mildly increased compared to the 1980’s, and it is still characterized by the young’s desire to keep that status and stay different from the adults for as long as possible, the emphasis on the socio-economic independence as the most important criterion of adulthood, the accentuation of advantages of youth, like flexibility and potential for innovation, and the tendency to move the upper limit of youth into the thirties. Oriented toward this type of prolonged youth are mostly the young with better social origin, belonging to younger age cohorts, still in the educational system, or with finished academic education, and students and pupils. On the other side, the adult-centric oriented youth does not think it differs from the older population; it is more prone to accepting a paternalistic attitude of the society toward the young and more considerate toward the traditional criteria of adulthood. Those young people are most often close to their thirties, of a lower social origin and holding a blue-collar employment, and are either employed or unemployed. The relationship toward the future, in turn, points to the survival of the discrepancy between the youth’s pronounced optimism when it comes to their personal future, and superficial optimism regarding the future of the society. In that vein, the pessimistic view of their personal future increases mildly with the age of the respondents and their entrance into the working life, and especially because of the unemployment status. But, what is intriguing is that the stated pessimism and optimism of the young in the 1990’s remained the same as in the 1980’s, although the social circumstances of their coming of age had changed essentially. The hierarchies and value structures of the young followed the basic social changes, in the manner that everything that was the consequence of life resources’ and perspectives’ narrowing, was manifested in the results, as an even more accentuated belief in the values of privacy and individual affirmation. That way, the young sent a clear message that they see their future more and more, as a goal which can be achieved exclusively by depending on one’s own strengths and support of friends and family, with great distrust toward the institutions of the society, especially the political ones. It is for this reason that the greatest differences between the 1986 and the 1999 research are the ones relating to material status and independence, then, professional achievement, and the values relating to tradition, especially nationality and religion show a big increase as well. It is intere

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