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War Veterans' Politics and Organizing Dynamics in Croatia

The majority of studies on war veterans in stable democratic regimes approached the veterans' issue from a social policy point of view. The underlying assumption of these studies is that war veterans present a social status group originally created and later maintained by the state by means of distinctive legal status provisions and special social security benefits grounded in military service to the state. Such over-determining link to the state proves to be problematic in transitional post-conflict societies where the dominant approaches aim at dissociation of war veterans from the state, i.e. war veterans are perceived as security threats and uncivil civil society actors that undermine democratization processes and therefore they are seen as temporary social group and transitional political subjects. The aim of this paper is to explore veterans' politics and organizing dynamics in Croatia in order to show how the war veterans, as paradigmatic political workers, rose to the political scene and subsequently secured uncontested privileged position in Croatian social and political system. Contrary to arguments that relate veterans' associations to top-down politics or define veterans' organizations as extension of former (para-)military life the paper will try to demonstrate more complex veteran-state- society relationship by approaching veterans as autonomous social actors and heterogeneous social group. The paper is based on survey data analysis of veterans' party preferences and political participation carried out in 2015, analysis of data from State registry on civil society organizations, and interviews with representatives of war veterans' organizations and state and political parties' officials.

war veterans’ organizations ; civil society ; Croatia ; mobilization

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