Migracijske i etničke teme (Apr 2011)
The Attitudes of Croatian Citizens toward Cultural Diversities
Abstract
The paper is based on part of results of a representative national examination of Croatian citizens’ attitudes about cultural diversities in Croatian society. A field survey was conducted by using the personal interview method in the respondent’s household, within the framework of an omnibus research. By cultural diversities, the authors mean national and religious communities. In this respect, Croatia is culturally a heterogeneous political community like most countries of the contemporary world. Therefore, the relationship of its citizens to cultural and other diversities will become an increasingly important socio-political and scientific topic, and the authors hope that their research will help to sensitize the public in this regard. It was found, unexpectedly, that Croatian citizens in fact offer somewhat weaker “resistance to multicultural society” (as measured by Eurobarometer), since only 8 per cent in total said it was bad or very bad for the country. Namely, almost one in four (23 per cent) Europeans did not agree with the statement that people of different ethnic or cultural backgrounds enrich their countries. Even in relation to the European Union, Croatian respondents expressed moderate optimism, because a fairly smaller number of them (42%) from a comparative European average (48%) believed that joining the European Union threatens national cultural identity. The impact or the lack of impact of socio-demographic characteristics of respondents coincides in part with similar trends in research, for example in the Netherlands. In this research, only three predictors of results on the scale of cultural exclusion turned out to be statistically significant: sex, degree of religiosity and national affiliation. In a great world comparative research project it was established that young people generally showed greater acceptance of cultural (and other) diversities in their societies, and it should be pointed out that age did not act in the expected direction in this research, which the authors found disturbing.
