Public Relations in Croatia, 2
Introduction
Public relations practices vary across the world and there is still much to learn about the
development of international practices of public relations. According to Van Leuven and Pratt
(1996), there is a continuum of public relations development in the world. On one side of the
continuum are the nations in the West where private sector organizations practice public
relations for commercial gain. Conversely, on the opposite end of the continuum are nations in
the developing world that have often used public relations for nation building. Public relations’
history and development in Eastern Europe falls somewhere in the middle of this continuum.
Eastern Europe is an important area to study because unlike other regions, where multinational
corporations introduced the practice, Eastern European public relations is making a transition
from a government propaganda function to an organization-public relationship building
function. The nations that have recently emerged from communism provide excellent
opportunities to study how public relations is both being influenced by, and in turn is
influencing, new social, economic and political relationships.
The purpose of this article is to describe and provide a benchmark of the practice of
public relations in one of the recently established East European nations. The nation of Croatia
is one of the nations that gained independence following the break up of the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia (FRY). In the past decade it has experienced a civil war (1991-1995) and a repressive
political system. Today, Croatia is the recipient of large amounts of assistance from the
international community for civil society and media development projects. A strong civil
society sector has worked in conjunction with many international organizations to foster a
nascent democratic political system. Croatians now benefit from the establishment of various
commercial media outlets. When compared with other former Yugoslavian member states such
Convention