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conclusion Between or Beyond Nations? Class, Ethnicity, and Transnationalism in the Global Century This study captured two cohorts of Croatian Australians in a specific moment of their migration process, while their transnational lives were continuing and transforming. As transnationalism theory has postulated, migration is an ongoing process that does not finish either at the moment of landing in the new country or at some indeterminable moment of assimilation . The migration experiences described in this book also reflect the historical contexts, both of their home country, Croatia, especially turbulent in the last decade of the twentieth century, as well as of their host country, Australia, with its dynamic social development over the postwar decades. The transnational lives of Croatian Australians therefore make part of their homeland’s, as well as the hostland’s, migration and social history. This book identified an urban, middle-class cohort of Croatian immigrants, conspicuously different from the earlier working-class cohort who arrived in Australia during the 1950s through the 1970s. The urban cohort did not feature in previous research for several reasons: Croatian professionals only started coming in larger numbers in the late 1980s and their numbers are considerably smaller compared to the previous cohort; they are scattered in the suburbs of Australian cities and therefore lack the demographic density and visibility of the previous cohorts; and researchers who studied Croatians in Australia usually started from ethnic venues and associations where middleclass Croatians could not be found (e.g., Kolar-Panov 1997; Skrbiš 1999). Although migration experiences of other migrant groups may match the experiences of Australian Croatians at many points, one of the specifically Croatian points is that considerable emigration from the country continued i-xiv_1-258_Coli.indd 205 9/23/08 11:11:14 AM 206 . conclusion beyond the stage of escaping rural poverty, a stage that ended in the 1960s. The next large emigration was a brain drain in the 1980s. The relatively open communism and favorable economic conditions of the late 1960s and 1970s produced scores of educated people, “Westernized in advance,” who could successfully compete for admission into desirable countries and who, amidst the political turbulence and economic hardship of the last communist decade combined with the historically established pattern of emigration, left the country. That they were educated white Europeans facilitated their admission in overseas countries of immigration. The result of the historically created propensity of Croatians to leave the country when things get tough is a large diaspora scattered over five continents , one of the largest relative to the home population (Banović 1990). Croatian sociologist S. Mežnarić (1991) proposed that in Croatia “migration substitutes for development.” The country is today in the waiting room of the European Union and its admission may slow down emigration as well as add a new dimension to the transnationalism of those who have already left. For example, maintaining connections with the home country and claiming its citizenship has been identified among the Australian-born of Croatian ancestry (as well as members of some other European ethnic communities) as a ticket for the access to the EU in the foreseeable future. This study focused on migrants’ identities and values as they reconfigure in the transnational context, depending on the migrants’ demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. The identities of most younger-to-middle-aged middle-class Croatians developed an exterritorial and “portable” core—their profession—so their migration and mobility were not experienced as a painful uprooting. For the same reason, their transnationalism was of a cosmopolitan kind, and the nation, either Croatian, Australian, or any other, ceased to be the framework of their lives. The framework was global; wherever their human capital was sought, they could go—and many did—and feel richer for it, not just in an economic sense. For most working-class migrants, the core of their identity remained “ethnic,” determined by blood (ancestry) and territory (place of origin), although enlarged from a local-ethnic to ethnonational identity in the process of migration. This type of identity made their transnationalism bilocal and binational, the bridge between the two places and two countries. Concerning concrete transnational practices identified in the two migrant cohorts, they fit into what Portes, Guarnizo, and Landolt (1999) and Faist (2000) classified as “political” and “(socio)cultural” manifestations of transnationalism, as analyzed in chapter 6. Transnational economic activity, apart from remittances, which are nowadays a declining phenomenon, seems i-xiv_1-258_Coli.indd 206 9/23/08 11:11:14 AM [18.221.165.246] Project MUSE (2024...

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