For the Homeland Ready! Croatian Diaspora Politics and Cold War Separatist Terrorism

Of the myriad terrorist organizations that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s, those supporting the destruction of socialist Yugoslavia and the establishment of an independent Croatia were among the most active. In one ten year period, Croatian separatists committed no fewer than 52 noteworthy incidents of violence in Australia. Elsewhere — including West Germany, the United States, and within Yugoslavia itself — émigré Croat radicals were responsible for more than fifty assassinations or assassination attempts, forty bombings of public buildings and monuments, and two airplane hijackings during the same time. This talk examines how transnational structures and frames stimulated émigré political actors to first imagine, then develop and finally justify the decision to incorporate violence into their repertoires of political engagement. The talk focuses on how difficulties arising from the fact that the Croatian diaspora existed in ‘landscapes’ as much as ‘lands’ helped define and delimit the repertoires of political action taken up by radicals. The internal and external pressures of being forced to operate in transnational space led Croatian radicals to cultivate a culture of abandonment, betrayal, and persecution, in which the Croats were portrayed as a nation of victims without allies. This helped precipitate a radicalization of the separatist movement, as many within the Croatian diaspora increasingly became convinced that only “self-initiated action” — i.e. political violence and terrorism — could hasten the establishment of an independent Croatian state.

Mate Nikola Tokić is Junior Fellow at the Central European University's Institute for Advanced Study and Assistant Professor of European and East European History at the American University in Cairo. In addition to several articles on political violence and radicalization among émigré Croats, he has worked extensively on the relationship between social memory and political legitimacy in socialist Yugoslavia. He is presently completing a manuscript entitled For the Homeland Ready! Croatian Diaspora Politics and Cold War Separatist Terrorism that explores the transnational networks and political mobilization of radical émigré Croatian separatists in the context of the Cold War.