It would be wrong to suggest that the story I have told relates uniquely or equally to all Croats in Australia or that theirs is a narrative of unequivocal success in terms of community relations and citizenship formation. However, this article has argued that superficial and essentialist observations about the Croats’ predisposition to a certain kind of narrow and inward-looking nationalism are wanting in many respects. Events leading to the collapse of Yugoslavia were not precipitated by conspiratorial émigré ‘separatists’ but by the breakdown of social, political and economic life, the absence of social cohesion, a serious deficit of social capital and the collapse of communism in Europe. As is well documented, the fall of Yugoslavia occasioned a series of terrible wars of succession and great suffering. ^[49] Some feared that there would be unrest and violence among and between South Slav groups in Australia, but this did not eventuate. On the contrary, in their relief work, Croats drew on the skills of active citizenship they had acquired over many years from the model of their ‘multicultural practice’ in the microcosm of their clubs and social and religious centres. It could be said that it was understandable that they should embark on concerted action given the circumstances of the war. But as any student of the social history of modern warfare can testify, there is nothing inevitable about a ‘united front’ at times of crisis or in war. It seems reasonable to suggest that having negotiated their acculturation without compromising their multiple (mutually compatible) identities—ethnic, social, political and professional—Croats could now draw on their experience of decades of activism. They had pursued this activism in the face of indifference at best, and hostility at worst, and for the duration of the war managed vast shipments of aid in many forms as well as rallying moral and political support among the wider population for the cause of Croatian sovereignty.

The war of succession in Croatia was therefore a defining moment for regional and urban Croatian community life in Australia. It brought together, in concerted action, Croats from different centres including, for example, the Port Lincoln fishermen who donated tonnes of canned seafood. The experience of decades of intense associational life and voluntary activity for non-material gains schooled them and prepared them to manage aid on a substantial international scale. It was the persistent efforts of these Croats themselves to maintain a sense of national identity through language, music, sport and welfare work that ultimately produced a community that balanced the inward push to preserve their heritage and the outward pull towards integration. For example, many of the offspring of the Croatian-born who have successfully negotiated their dual national identities have founded, and now run, structures appropriate to the changed circumstances. These include, for example, the Australian-Croatian Chambers of Commerce. Such Australian Croats are also products of the socialisation experienced in the Croatian ethnic schools system. ^[50] The formation of social capital, as we have seen, is linked to voluntary activity, which is ‘socially patterned’: family background is an important variable in adult civic participation. This suggests that if we look beyond the structures of ethnic association we may find a high predisposition towards active citizenship of the Australian-born offspring of immigrants who are engaged in their communities. ^[51]

Some have depicted Croatian immigrants arriving soon after 1945 and in the 1960s and 1970s as incapable of accommodating multiple identities and more crudely ‘nationalistic’ than a later generation of educated immigrants who do not seek so much to ‘preserve’ Croatian identity or even distinguish themselves by it but to cultivate (personal) professional satisfaction and success. Possibly this dichotomous view is compromised by a superficial understanding of the dynamics at work in the established ethnic organisations and the limited data and small sample available in the study of recent immigrants. ^[52] I have argued that there is much of interest in the lives of the earlier waves of postwar Croatian immigrants to the historian of Australian multiculturalism, active citizenship and national identity. There is also much that the current Croatian Government could learn from the example of members of its most far-flung diasporic community, including those returning to their country of birth permanently or temporarily, as it prepares for its admission into the European Community. ^[53]

We have seen that theorists of citizenship and multiculturalism note one important way of integrating minorities into the body politic is to foster strong ties across various social strata in a vigorous associational life that allows individuals and groups to promote their interests and participate in political life, conventionally and less conventionally defined, for the greater good. There is a long tradition of discourse on civic life along these lines. For example, the keys to the final (successful) implantation of republican and democratic values in France 80 years after the French Revolution of 1789 were a vigorous civic life evident across different regions and within different social groups. In France, women and men, separately or together, involved themselves in organisations ranging from those arguing for prison reform and agricultural progress to those sponsoring charitable ventures for the sick, the infirm and the outcast: there was not uniformity but a plurality of intentions and identities as people demonstrated their attachment to the centre through their intense activism at the local level. ^[54] The Croats to whom I refer here may, indeed, have been ‘anti-Yugoslav’ but, predominantly, they expressed this through the positive affirmation of their identity as Australian citizens and through their legitimate desire to maintain aspects of their Croatian heritage, which was in turn tolerated and then nurtured in their new home. Overwhelmingly, their silent and hitherto unacknowledged contribution to social cohesion and to the presence of a robust Australian citizenry, inside their communal structures and within Australia as a whole, has remained hidden by the worn but well maintained fabric of their associational life.