ABSTRACT
Of the fascist movements active during World War II, arguably none can claim as dynamic a Cold War-era afterlife as the Croatian Ustaša. Following the war, many of the highest-ranking members of the Independent State of Croatia—including Ante Pavelić—escaped abroad and rebuilt the movement in exile. And for two decades from the early 1960s to the 1980s, radical supporters of the most fundamental tenets of Ustašism became among the most animated perpetrators of terrorism and political violence anywhere in the world. Nevertheless, the use of the label “Ustaša” to describe the activities of Cold War-era Croatian radicals in the emigration tends to be reductionist to the point of being misleading. After World War II, what both contemporary and contemporaneous accounts call “the Ustaša movement in exile” was in fact an amalgam of diverse actors, factions, organizations, and movements, many often in direct opposition to one another. This chapter explores the transformative effects the social, political, economic, and historical conditions of life in exile during the Cold War had on the ideological and strategic positioning of the Ustaša movement, and how this led to meaningful differences among the Ustašisms of the interwar, wartime, and postwar eras.
