Abstract
This chapter presents empirical findings from the TRACES dataset. The authors tackle the issue of ethnicisation from a social demographical point of view, focussing on mixed marriages and their changing societal context. Marriages across the boundaries of ethno-national communities were an important topic of study already in the former Yugoslavia. They were considered as an indicator and a factor of social integration in the communist society. After the collapse of Yugoslavia, social scientists maintained their interest in intermarriages as an indicator of ethnic tolerance. In their own contributions, the two authors aim to make links between (1) the acceptance of mixed marriage from 2000 and later; (2) the possibilities of contacts between nationalities and (3) the patterns of marriage and family formation according to nationality. On the basis of the model of investigations developed in the chapter of Sekulic, two main hypotheses are proposed. First, the authors expect a positive link between possibilities of contacts and mixed marriages between two nationalities and assume that contacts facilitate tolerance between nationalities. Second, they hypothesise that strong dissimilarities in life course patterns of family formation create barriers in the “marriage market” against mixed marriages. They also wonder whether these two hypotheses actually complete themselves or compete between them. Overall, the results are nuanced and show that these links are strongly contextual.
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Notes
- 1.
The notion of contact does not have the same meaning here as it does in Sekulic’s chapter, where mixed marriage is considered one dimension of contact (see also Sekulic et al. 2006). In the present case, possibilities of contact in the marriage market between two potential partners are envisaged as the probabilities that two persons of different nationalities meet.
- 2.
Terms such as minority and majority are based on the relative size of the demographics. These terms are not related to a political or juridical definition.
- 3.
A question on the nationality declared in the 1991 census was asked in the TRACES survey. In the case of a non-response, if the respondent did not remember the nationality that he or she had declared or if he or she boycotted the census, as was the case for many Albanians, another question on the nationality that the respondent considered to be his or her (at the time of the census) was asked and was used as a proxy for nationality.
- 4.
We used the term “Muslims” rather than “Bosniaks” because the latter term did not exist in 1991.
- 5.
This method consists of drawing 10,000 subsamples from the TRACES data with replacement and computing the median and the prevalence for each subsample (Davison and Hinkley 1997). The final estimators are the mean of all estimations, and we dispose of the standard errors of these means.
- 6.
- 7.
Questions on the possibility of intermarriage with a Rom, a Bulgarian, a citizen of Albania, a Russian or a citizen of the European Union or the USA were also asked. However, we exclude answers given for these nationalities to restrict ourselves to the more numerous nationalities present in the former Yugoslavia.
- 8.
The nationality considered is the nationality declared in 1991
- 9.
We draw 10,000 subsamples with replacement and estimated in each of these subsamples the isolation index for each nationality. In each case, the isolation indices were estimated by accounting for the sample weights.
- 10.
EESP data indicate that 46.9 % of the subsample of interviewed persons in Montenegro (N = 1417) declared themselves Montenegrins, 29.5 % declared themselves Serbs, 3.6 % declared themselves Montenegrin-Serbs and 1 % declared themselves Serbian-Montenegrins. The remaining 19 % adopted other nationalities.
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Le Goff, JM., Giudici, F. (2014). The Demise of Mixed Marriage?. In: Spini, D., Elcheroth, G., Corkalo Biruski, D. (eds) War, Community, and Social Change. Peace Psychology Book Series, vol 17. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7491-3_4
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