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This article addresses the relationship between multiculturalism, identity politics and active citizenship from the example of the history of Croatian settlement and Croatian associational or community life in Australia. My primary focus is on those Croats who arrived in the first two waves of post-1945 immigration because they represent the majority of Croatian-born in Australia and because there is a considerable amount of evidence (hitherto barely touched upon either by historians or by theorists of Australian multiculturalism) relating to this settlement experience and its impact on Australian civic life and identity.
My case study suggested the lived experience of Croatian association was a means by which individuals who had little education, poor English language skills and limited economic and professional opportunities exhibited an attachment to and an understanding of democratic processes and values in the pluralist society they had embraced as their own. This experience, in turn, contributed to their integration and, at the same time, to the retention of elements of their cultural background. In spite of arguments to the contrary, it also contributed to their peaceful coexistence with fellow Australians, Yugoslav and non-Yugoslav, and to social cohesion. [1]
The example of Croatian associational life is not exceptional and much of what I argue may be usefully applied to other immigrant groups in Australia across the same period. [2] The Croatian example, however, does stand out in some respects. It is instructive because, as this article shows, the history of Croatian communities in Australia presents us with a series of paradoxes that call into question some of the accepted stereotypes of Croatian behaviour in Australia. [3] Further, the collapse of Yugoslavia and the ensuing wars of the 1990s enabled Croats in Australia to demonstrate their capacity to organise themselves and their local community structures on a global scale and provide the historian with the opportunity to observe the impact—locally, nationally and internationally—of their practice of active citizenship in the course of their daily lives. [4] This article thus speculates on the effect of citizen engagement at the grassroots level on an evolving Australian identity and attempts, in part, to answer the question posed by Geoffrey Brahm Levey: ‘How well does Australia allow immigrants to serve Australian democracy?’ [5] Finally, we will consider the capacity of Croats in Australia to contribute to the future development and quality of Australian and Croatian civic life in the context of returns to Croatia (permanent and temporary) of members of the first generation and their Australian-born offspring.
Methodologically, my approach rests on the belief that close micro-studies of the history of the community engagement of immigrant groups from the inside out and from the bottom up provide an informed and nuanced understanding of the debates surrounding multiculturalism and citizenship in Australia. I will first discuss briefly the relevant points of contention in these debates and then outline the history of Croatian settlement in Australia in order to introduce my discussion of four paradoxes regarding Croatian community activism in Australia, which I believe warrant further reflection. The first of these paradoxes is that at a time when Croatian identity was not recognised in Australia and without government support, Croats displayed a high degree of initiative and flexibility in the establishment of community organisations. Second, Croatian women, overwhelmingly working class and poorly represented in formal Croatian structures, were active and visible in many aspects of associational life. Third, Croatian immigrants had low levels of education and low socioeconomic status but enjoyed success in their political lobbying for national recognition at the local, state and Commonwealth levels and attained a high degree of financial security relative to other immigrant groups and relative to the Australian population at large. Finally, whereas Croatia was not a sovereign state and one of the foundational tenets of Yugoslavism was that it would supersede or ‘accommodate’ south Slav nationalisms, Croats became known for their strong national identity.
Brian Galligan and Winsome Roberts argue that ‘Australian citizenship is grounded in the everyday life of citizens and local communities’. [6] Broadly, I support this premise, but reject their claim that multiculturalism militates against the practice of Australian citizenship and against social cohesion and that it is potentially corrosive. Galligan and Roberts argue persuasively against Benedict Anderson’s idea of the nation as an imagined construct and against minimalist conceptions of citizenship as grounded only in a set of laws or rights, universal and supranational, or ‘anational’. Evoking Edmund Burke’s ‘little platoons’ as the sites of the expression of civic identity and nationhood in its various guises, they suggest a middle way between triumphant and partial images of a monocultural Australian national identity and the (anarchic) cultural diversity of dogmatic multiculturalism, which, at its most radical, eschews the notion of a set of overarching commonly held Australian values in political, social and cultural life. Galligan and Roberts believe that Australia is not multicultural in the ‘classic’ sense and probably never was. [7] Rather, they argue that the provision of support for immigrant groups, especially those from non-English-speaking backgrounds, and the official promotion of tolerance for diversity and equal opportunity have facilitated a process of complete integration or ‘transition’ whereby the subsequent generations are ‘thoroughly Australianised’. [8] Referring to the various ways in which Australians have revealed their affinity with each other and with a set of political and ethical norms, Galligan and Roberts discuss voluntary associational life spanning the provision of medical services to remote rural areas to local self-help or environmental groups as an expression of active Australian citizenship in the microcosm. (Curiously, associational life along ethnic lines does not figure in this scenario even when the outcome is, as Galligan and Roberts argue, integration.) It would seem, then, that in opposition to the concept of multiculturalism as a fixed alternative to (an incomplete) vision of Australianness as white, male and British, ‘transitional multiculturalism’ is a catalyst for change. But the idea that multiculturalism has reached its ‘use by’ date is based on a superficial understanding of integration (defined largely in terms of rates of intermarriage in the second and third generations) and a product of the failure to acknowledge that citizen association along ethnic lines has contributed to the moulding of an evolving Australian identity. [9] While possibly nostalgic, even closed at times, ethnic structures have been responsive to change and have assumed some of the (positive) characteristics of the dominant culture to which their members freely and, generally, enthusiastically subscribed. Further, ethnic association has provided a vehicle for immigrants to experience the fullness of Australian civil society and active citizenship in communities that are familiar to them and which inspire trust, one of the preconditions of active citizenship and the formation of social capital. The earliest studies of ethnic associational life, even if generally sympathetic, labelled it as insular and thereby outside the parameters of ‘Australian’ or ‘host’ associational life and irrelevant to the practice of active citizenship. [10] This tendency has persisted for the most part in the critique of multiculturalism and in general debates about citizenship and Australian identity. I reject the glaring double standard that allows for associational life emanating from ‘Australian’ circles to be inherently open and enriching to the wider community and ethnic activism, inherently insular and without benefits for anyone beyond the group in question. By definition, all associational life—‘Australian’ or ‘ethnic’—is, at least initially, inward looking in the sense that it serves a prescribed set of interests.
The debate about the appropriateness of the term ‘multicultural’ in Australian public life is largely semantic and, apparently, irrelevant to a vast proportion of the population who endorse its general application. [11] Critics of the term, alarmist or mild, are on occasion more theoretical or abstract than empirical in their observations of Australian multicultural practice.[12] Alternatively, some use the concept of multiculturalism in their armoury as they deny the integrity of an Australian national identity and the existence of a set of core civic values to which Australians generally adhere, and as they pronounce the end of the era of nationalism or the advent of the ‘post-national’ world. But this position is just as extreme and largely untenable. A more reasonable position recognises that multiculturalism, grounded in the ideals of equity, access and social justice, among others, is also a vehicle for the practice of active citizenship, which, in all its diversity, contributes to the continuing evolution of an Australian identity. This identity is not weakened but is nourished by the activism evident in ethnic association at the lowest level and among some of the least powerful members of the body politic.
[1] One of the best examples of the way in which Croatian immigrants were typically portrayed may be found in Aarons, Mark 1989, Sanctuary. Nazi fugitives in Australia, William Heinemann Australia, Melbourne.
[2] Several of my propositions could be applied to the other immigrant groups arriving in large numbers after 1945, but it is beyond the scope of this paper to embark on an extended comparative study.
[3] Aarons, for example, writes of the ‘massive’ and ‘credible evidence’ amassed by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) on (alleged) Croatian terrorist activity in Australia and routinely refers to faceless ‘Croatian extremists’ in Sanctuary. It was normal practice to conflate Croatian social and cultural activism with international terrorism and wartime collaboration. Possibly the lack of discrimination in the appraisal of Croatian association made it more difficult to identify who, precisely, was responsible for the series of bomb attacks on Yugoslav properties in Australia in the 1960s and 1970s. For a discussion of some of these issues, see Drapac, Vesna 2005, ‘Perceptions of post-WWII Croatian immigrants: the South Australian case’, Croatian Studies Review, vols 3–4, pp. 27–39.
[4] David Hogan and David Owen have noted three measures of active citizenship as: the ‘breadth of participation’ in voluntary organisations; the amount of time devoted to voluntary organisations; and ‘participation in political actions’. See their ‘Social capital, active citizenship and political equality in Australia’, 2000, in Ian Winter (ed.), Social Capital and Public Policy in Australia, Australian Institute of Family Studies, Melbourne, pp. 74–104.
[5] Here Levey is turning on its head the question James Jupp raises in his 2003 publication, How Well Does Australian Democracy Serve Immigrant Australians?. Levey, Geoffrey Brahm 2008, ‘Multiculturalism and Australian national identity’, in Geoffrey Brahm Levey (ed.), Political Theory and Australian Multiculturalism, Berghahn Books, New York and Oxford, pp. 254–76.
[6] Galligan, Brian and Roberts, Winsome 2004, Australian Citizenship, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, p. xv.
[7] By this they mean Australian immigrant groups from non-English-speaking backgrounds are not distinctive, mutually exclusive and self-perpetuating or entirely separate from the ‘dominant Anglo-Australian mainstream’. They suggest that for most Australians multiculturalism means simply equality of opportunity and access as well as tolerance for cultural diversity. See their Australian Citizenship, p. 14 and Chapter 4. See also Levey, ‘Multicultural political thought in the Australian perspective’; and Galligan, Brian and Roberts, Winsome 2008, ‘Multiculturalism, national identity and pluralist democracy: the Australian variant’, in Geoffrey Brahm Levey (ed.), Political Theory and Australian Multiculturalism, Berghahn Books, New York and Oxford, pp. 1–26, 209–24.
[8] Galligan and Roberts, Australian Citizenship, pp. 5, 14. One of their key markers of integration is the successive generations’ marriage outside the immigrant group.
[9] James Jupp is critical of sweeping interpretations of integration as represented by statistics on intermarriage and the relatively careless use of intermarriage as a marker of the transitional nature of ethnic association and activism. He notes that there are numerous ways in which the second and third generations as well as Australia as a whole continue to be influenced and shaped by multiculturalism. See Jupp, James 2008, ‘A pragmatic response to a novel situation: Australian multiculturalism’, in Geoffrey Brahm Levey (ed.), Political Theory and Australian Multiculturalism, Berghahn Books, New York and Oxford, pp. 225–41, 230–1.
[10] The pioneering work of Jean Martin, for example, set the standard for assessing group organisation along ethnic or ‘minority’ lines in terms of its potential to engage outside or ‘host’ structures: ‘Theoretically, ethnic associations might take upon themselves the role of socialising individual immigrants into the host society; like some therapeutic groups, their success might then be measured by their disintegration. No such function formed any part of the goals of ethnic community organisation in Adelaide.’ See Martin, Jean I. 1972, Community and Identity: Refugee groups in Adelaide, The Australian National University Press, Canberra, p. 122. This position is also the background to the anti-assimilationist rhetoric of some elements in the multicultural lobby in its formative stages. See Lopez, Mark 2000, The Origins of Multiculturalism in Australian Politics 1945–1975, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.
[11] A poll conducted in 2005 found 80 per cent of Australians supported or strongly supported the policy of multiculturalism. See Markus, Maria R. 2008, ‘Is Australian multiculturalism in crisis? A comment on Galligan and Roberts and on Jupp’, in Geoffrey Brahm Levey (ed.), Political Theory and Australian Multiculturalism, Berghahn Books, New York and Oxford, pp. 242–55.
[12] In Australian Citizenship, for example, Galligan and Roberts do not address ethnic association and focus largely on government policy and citizenship debates.