This article outlines the differences and commonalities between social policy developments in Croatia and those in Central Europe. In Croatia, issues such as national identities and the redefinition of citizenship, war, state-building and crisis management have produced a complex mix of statist centralization and parallelism of welfare actors at the central and local level. While subject both to neo-liberal pressures to privatize provision, and later to European Union influences, both of these came later, and were more mediated, than in Central Europe. Croatia forms a bridge to studying the uneven welfare arrangements of other countries in South-East Europe, marked as they are by complex governance arrangements and the presence of social development and postwar reconstruction discourses.