Youth and transition in Croatia
Between 1986 and 1999, radical and far-reaching changes occurred in Croatia, which were 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 did not belong to the majority - Croatian. The political system, like in rest of Yugoslavia, was normatively defined as self-management socialism. The ideological and 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, a social and class conflict-free society guaranteeing a relatively high minimum of social rights (employment, and through this 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 cult of J. Broz Tito. This 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, what had been up to then, suppressed antagonisms as well as non-dogmatic ideas. It was actually a period of a certain political liberalization, visible in the decreasing of ideological pressures and in the 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 ...