A New Book on Political Émigrés and the Croatian Peasant Party

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This overview and analysis of the activity of the Peasant Party among our diaspora contributes to a better understanding of the post-1990 political processes in Croatia: a broad range of people in the diaspora communities made active efforts in the moulding of modern Croatia and participated in its political scene. Further, the political tenets championed by Peasant Party leader Stjepan Radić were incorporated into the core of the political programme proposed by the future President Franjo Tuđman.

 

The book, drawing on the available sources, literature and publications, presents and analyses the understudied political activity of the Croatian Peasant Party among our diaspora in the period from the end of the Second World War (1945) to the revival of the party in the homeland in 1989 and its participation in the multiparty elections of 1990. The political activity of the Peasant Party is analysed chronologically from three aspects: the activities of the party’s leadership among diaspora communities, collaboration through emigrant organisations in central and eastern Europe that operated under the political and financial aegis of the United States of America, and collaboration with other political émigrés from Yugoslavia.

The book aims to provide a historiographical contribution to our understanding of the work of the whole of the Croatian political diaspora in the period from 1945 to 1990, in particular a historiographic contribution to a critical questioning of hypotheses stemming from long-standing prejudices that paint the political diaspora in broad strokes as terrorists, extremists, and as ideologically homogenous—the fruit of many years of propaganda propagated by the very Yugoslav regime that political émigrés aimed to remove from power.

An overview and analysis of the activity of the Peasant Party among our diaspora contributes to a better understanding of the post-1990 political processes in Croatia: a broad range of people in the diaspora communities made active efforts in the moulding of modern Croatia and participated in its political scene. Further, the political tenets championed by Peasant Party leader Stjepan Radić were incorporated into the core of the political programme proposed by the future President Franjo Tuđman and the HDZ party under his leadership.

Author Ivan Tepeš was born in Zagreb in 1980. In Zagreb he attended elementary and secondary school (the science and maths-focused 3rd gymnasium). He graduated with a degree in history and ethnology at the University of Zagreb’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and defended his graduate paper on the Lorković-Vokić putsch in 2004. He enrolled for doctoral studies in history in 2008 at the University of Zagreb’s Faculty of Croatian Studies. He has authored two papers.

From 2008 to 2015 Ivan Tepeš was employed at the Maksimir Centre for Culture and Information (Zagreb). He was elected to Croatian Parliament in November of 2015, holding the post of deputy speaker from January to October of 2016. He has been a staffer of the CHF since October of 2017 at the post of deputy director.

Find more at: https://www.agm.hr/hr/shop/hrvatska-politicka-emigracija—hss,799.html

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