The expansion of the European Union to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe which is expected in a foreseeable future would make borders meaningless. The Burgenland Croats in Austria, Hungary, and Slovakia have been getting used to that new unity for about a decade. There are numerous future challenges, but so also perspectives.

In addition to the news on Croatian national minorities in Europe, Matica’s Almanac brings about thirty contributions on important cultural and social events in the life of the overseas diaspora - of its both elder and younger generation - from Canada and Tierra del Fuego, to Australia and New Zealand. Briefly, the Croatian Emigrant Almanac 2003, with summaries in English and Spanish, cover nine thematic units containing 35 original contributions, which can also be read on the Internet at
http:// www.matis.hr/zbornik. The contents of and the information provided by the Croatian Emigrant Almanac links, this year, as many as fifteen countries.

The first unit includes an original scholarly work dealing with the question of return using data from one of the most developed Croatian counties. It surveys the recent emigration from Međimurje to the countries of Western Europe, i.e., after the Second
World War. It also attempts to estimate how many of the young people from Međimurje born abroad, may eventually return to Croatia, given that they were born and raised under cultural, educational, and linguistic conditions very different form those at home. The return of the emigrants is a dream of the young Croatian state, which just marked the tenth year of its independence, and still hopes to stop the trend to emigrate. Unfortunately, the reality is rather ruthless.

Overseas Croats and the people of Croatian origin in the overseas countries may not have such acute feelings about that topic. Most often they are brought together by activities tied to preservation and development of Croatian cultural identity; their media use the language of the countries of their residence, and their cultural and other association are now celebrating a century, or a century and a half, of successful activity - all of which has been carefully recorded by Matica’s media.

The number of contributions was large so some of them had to be left out. Most of the accepted contributions have been written by younger scholars, from Auckland University (Božić, Vrbančić...) and Macquarie University in Sidney (Škvorc, Budak...), to the University of Zagreb (Holjevac, Mesarić...), but also by our long-time contributors. Our readers have often raised the question of a Museum of Croatian Diaspora, so the Almanac offers a vision of a virtual Diaspora Museum, claiming that due to the rapid spread of the Internet technology, the classical museum concept has become an anachronism. The new museums are less and less collections of exhibits, and more and more modern communication centers. In any case, we have accepted the majority of our readers’ suggestions, we believe, to a mutual benefit.