Sounds of the Borderland by Baker Catherine

Author:Baker, Catherine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2010-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Music on the Market: Pop-Folk and Cultural Boundaries

Croatia after Tuđman was a 90 per cent ethnically homogenous country with a stable constitutional settlement and no serious threats to its integrity as a state. Of the 4.44 million inhabitants of Croatia registered by the 2001 census, 3.98 million were Croats. The 331,383 members of ethnic minorities included 201,631 Serbs, 20,755 Bosniaks, 19,636 Italians, 16,595 Hungarians, 15,082 Albanians, 13,173 Slovenes, 10,510 Czechs and 9,463 Roma. A further 89,130 people identified themselves as ‘ethnically uncommitted’ – including 9,302, almost all in Istria, who claimed a ‘regional affiliation’.1 Compared to the figures from the 1991 census, Croatia’s total population had dropped by 7.25 per cent. Serbs now represented 4.5 per cent rather than 12.2 per cent of the population, whereas the Croat population had increased by 11.5 per cent (Minority Rights Group International 2008). As far as the Croat–Serb relationship was concerned, the congruence between ethnic and political borders had hardened. The political border between Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina did not mark such a tidy cultural separation, especially where Herzegovina met the Dalmatian hinterland – though no Croatian political leader after 2000 agitated for a revision of the Bosnian borders in order to bring Herzegovina into the Croatian state.

The push to dismantle the informal networks of Tuđmanist governance in the early 2000s extended into cultural and media policy. Broadcasting reforms began with the appointment of Mirko Galić – the leader of the Forum 21 group of critical journalists – as director of HRT, then with a law which required civil society groups to name a ‘programming council’ which oversaw HRT’s activities and appointed its top officials. In-fighting between the civil society organizations obstructed them choosing a council and a new system was introduced in 2003 where the government and opposition would cooperate in naming the council members through parliament. This did not go far enough for the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE), which had been urging Croatia to accelerate broadcasting reform for years and warned that even the new system retained ‘a direct line between politics and the program of the public broadcaster’ (Obradović 2004:2). As imperfect as the new system might initially have seemed by OSCE standards,2 it nonetheless structured HRT as an arena for political contestation among parties rather than a direct means of monopolistic governmental communication. The OSCE’s other demand, for the government to enable private broadcasting on a national level, was easier to implement and two privately-owned national television concessions launched in 2000 and 2004. In the record industry, Croatia Records too lost its dominant position on the music market as several independent labels began to compete with it for the best-selling ‘domestic’ acts.

Besides the arguments over patriotic music and Thompson’s attitude to history, the most politicized topic in Croatian popular music was pop-folk from Serbia (and in fact from Bosnia) and its influence on Croatian music itself. The pop-folk debates were a key site for reproducing ethnicity in a period where, after the Račan years and the reform of HDZ, ethnicity was not so obviously an immediate political resource.

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