Civic and ethnic identity: The case of Croatia

The understanding of ethnicity as primordial has prevailed among the people of the former Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav identification was always present as a more “broader” identification for those who wanted to escape the narrow ethnic identification. The main argument of the article is that with the dissolution of the Yugoslav state the new functional equivalent to the Yugoslav identification is emerging in the form of the “civic identity”. This new civic identification allows people to express their distance from the narrow ethnic identification and the intense ethnic revival characterizing the first post-communist phase. In order to empirically substantiate the argument we used the 1995 World Value Survey data from Croatia.