SOUTHEASTERN EUROPE最新文献

This article deals with Croatian democratization as the most important process of its political modernization and identifies the main facilitating and inhibiting factors and their influence on its outcomes. The analysis is carried out at the sociostructural, institutional-political and sociocultural levels, while the outcomes of democratization are evaluated in relation to the features of a consolidated (substantive) democracy and the basic features of political modernization. It is shown that the specific sociostructural and sociocultural features – modeled by contingent factors – had a decisive influence on the context, processes and actors of democratization and its outcomes. It turns out that elite-driven democratization in such a specific context produced further limited modernization. Despite the normative-institutional consolidation and stability of democracy, incomplete sociostructural modernization and sociocultural adaptation, as well as democratic deficits, indicate that the political modernization of Croatian society and the state is still an open process.

Taking up the Croatian case and the gap in the literature concerning non-economic, micro-level drivers of migration, this article explores young peoples’ identity, and the perceptions of their country and the European Union. Survey data is analysed by means of hierarchical linear regression, aiming to answer the question to what extent the selected non-economic variables play a role in youth migration desire. Overall, the results show that these drivers do play a certain role. While perception of the EU seems to be irrelevant for young people’s migration desire, perception of Croatia is associated with it. Likewise, a stronger national identity acts as an inhibiting force. When comparing the EU and Croatia, young people do not demonstrate a defined vision of the EU, seeing it as a place where almost everything is better. In contrast, their opinion on Croatia is more nuanced, which makes variables connected to their local context more relevant.

This article deals with the level of democracy in Croatia after EU accession. The first part presents key events, processes, and actors which have shaped the trajectory of democratic development. The second part discusses the Croatian case in the context of current research on democratic backsliding. The third part tests the idea about democratic backsliding in Croatia by running regression models with democracy indices derived from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset. The findings challenge the idea of democratic backsliding in Croatia. The models do not show a clear association of decreased democracy scores after EU accession but point to a stronger role of the pre-accession period in increasing levels of democracy in Croatia. The models also highlight the explanatory role of executive and public sector corruption regarding democracy levels in Croatia. Instead of speaking of democratic backsliding, the Croatian case can be better described as one experiencing democratic stagnation.

One of the key themes in the three decades after the wars of Yugoslav dissolution has been reconciliation between Croatia and Serbia, two former Yugoslav republics that participated in the bloody fighting between 1991–1995 after Croatia declared independence. The recent inflation of the use of the term reconciliation requires a narrow and precise definition, which enables researchers and practitioners to adapt it to real-world cases and the available empirical evidence. In this article, the authors rely on the main features of the so-called “need-based model of socio-emotional reconciliation”, which was derived from social psychology to examine inter-group processes after violent conflict. They propose several amendments to this model to make it feasible for the analysis of inter-state relations, regarding reconciliation as a process, not a stable result of reconciliatory performances. They adopt this model to bilateral relations between Croatia and Serbia, with a focus on apologies related to the siege of Vukovar (1991) and the aftermath of Operation Storm (1995), and then discuss the model’s suitability for international relations theory.