The field of communication in Croatia: toward a comparative history of communication studies in Central and Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe was for a long time in modern history a veritable “black hole” about which little was known in Western academia, except to a minority of specialists. While this has started to change with the advent of the third wave of democratization in 1989/90, when much academic interest became focused on it, in the field of communication and media studies Eastern Europe is still very much perceived as the undifferentiated “other”, somewhat like the “global south” described by Thussu (2009). In this chapter, we begin to unpack this myth of uniformity by providing one country-specific historical analysis in the context of wider regional developments and the received history of communication studies in Central and Eastern Europe, including the Soviet Union. As an example of a historical analysis, itself necessary for every country in Eastern Europe as a basis for a regional post-socialist history of communication and media studies, we analyze the history of Croatian communication science in terms of institutional histories and changes in the thematic foci and paradigmatic approaches in the study of communication and media. The chapter concludes with a brief sketch of the present state of the field of communication and media studies in Eastern Europe, opening into a view on a future Eastern European research agenda.