Abstract: The Croatian “diaspora” is an invention of the 1990’s. Over the course of the 20thcentury, Croats living abroad were traditionally divided into three socio-political categories: “old emigrants,” “political émigrés” and “guest workers.” At the turn of the 1990’s, rising ethnic tensions in Yugoslavia pushed these groups towards a short-lived unity when diasporic organizations provided a vast humanitarian, military and lobbying support for the newly founded state of Croatia. At the end of the war, Franjo Tudjman’s Croatian Democratic Union used the supposed moral debt of the country to the “diaspora,” to enact discriminatory citizenship laws and enforce a de facto de-territorialized annexation of part of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Drawing on several years of research on diaspora politics in the former Yugoslavia, this paper highlights several simple yet often overlooked insights about the role of diasporas in international relations and conflicts. Firstly, it argues that “diasporas” are not agents of international politics in and of themselves. The agents are the organizations and institutions representing, or claiming to represent, a diaspora. The second argument is that “diasporas” should not be considered as unitary actors. Even if at times diasporic institutions might build coalitions, or unanimously support a cause for a certain period of time, in different circumstances these organizations can be significantly divided, disrupting notions of diasporic homogeneity. Finally, this paper shows that the all-encompassing label of “diaspora” can be appropriated by a government and used to push policies that have little to do with the “diaspora” itself but instead justify national policies that would otherwise be considered illegitimate.
Francesco Ragazzi
Ph.D. candidate, Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Paris) and Northwestern University (Chicago)
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