engleski

Retraditionalization or Reflexive Modernity: A Sociological Explanation of Fertility Trends in Mature Transitional Croatia

The chapter is a sociological reinterpretation of demographic analyses of the results relating to Croatia in a recent Eurostat report on fertility trends in Europe (Lanzieri, 2013). Namely, this report - discussing the present-day situation in 31 European countries against selected indicators of economic recession - has brought to light some unexpected and apparently contradictory results referring to the then accession country of Croatia. While Croatia has on the whole consistently followed the patterns of average total fertility rates in the surrounding European Union countries in the periods 2000-2002, 2003-2005, 2006-2008, and 2009-2011, the pre-accession period data showed that – in contrast with the situation in some economically advanced EU countries – employed women with higher educational attainment tended to give more births than unemployed women with lower educational attainment. In this respect, Croatia proved to be a polar opposite of Germany. Likewise, the fertility of educated and employed women in Croatia was among the highest in Europe, while in some Eastern European EU member countries fertility rates on the whole had returned to "lowest-low” levels. This book chapter contains a sociological explanation of the apparent contradictions in socio-demographic patterns of fertility in late transitional (pre-accession) Croatia. The explanation is based on theoretical contextualizations of the social position, values and attitudes of women in Croatia in the periods of early (Tomić-Koludrović, Kunac, 2000) and mature transition (Tomić-Koludrović, Lončarić, 2007 ; Tomić-Koludrović, Zdravković, 2013). The conclusion is that – in spite of the consistently high appreciation of family values among women in Croatia - the current sociodemographic fertility patterns are not attributable to the alleged post-socialist retraditionalization, but rather to a mixture of the socialist heritage, postmodern values and trends related to the current economic crisis. The current apparent contradictions in Croatian fertility trends are seen as a result of a non-linear modernization process and partial acquisition of values that took place in its course. The theoretical approach advocated as best-suited in this case is one based on newer theories of modernization (Inglehart and Welzel, Beck, Touraine) and a multidimensional analysis of the data.

Croatia, transition, women, fertility, modernity

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