“We Are Now an Actual Nation”: The Impact of National Independence on the Croatian Diaspora in Canada

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The political scientist Walker Connor identifies two factors that help him distinguish between “immigrant communities” and “diasporas”: 1) the degree of loyalty felt toward the adopted host nation as opposed to the ancestral homeland and 2) the extent of assimilation (“Ethnonationalism” 80). The comparative framework Connor developed to clarify the terminological confusion resulting from scholarly attempts to theorize the relationship between ethnicity, nation, and state has had only limited success, because the assumptions that inform his definitions of immigrant communities and diasporas reproduce a functionalist teleology of “movement from one form of integrity to another” (Rouse 10), mediated by notions of adaptation and accommodation. Although his seminal earlier work challenged the “tendency to equate nationalism with a feeling of loyalty to the state rather than with loyalty to the nation” (“A Nation” 378) and drew our attention to the centrality of (ethnic) self consciousness in nationalism, Connor has not fully investigated the important question of how self-consciousness is obtained and transformed and how it manifests itself in situations of change. The integral relationship between self-consciousness and loyalty necessitates an investigation of those societal contexts and processes that influence group loyalties. These considerations are particularly significant for the analysis of diasporan identities for which issues of self-representation, the practices and processes associated with transnationalism, and, in the case of Croatians in Canada presented here, the impact of national independence on identity claims, are central. Rather than instilling a sense of unity, Croatian independence has either created or reinforced the contestations over notions of Croatian peoplehood.