Nationalism and Yugoslavia

Education, Yugoslavism and the Balkans before World War II

Pieter Troch

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781780767536
• eBook ISBN: 9780857737687
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Created after World War I, 'Yugoslavia' was a combination of ethnically, religiously, and linguistically diverse but connected South Slav peoples - Slovenes, Croats and Serbs but also Bosnian Muslims, Macedonians, and Montenegrins - in addition to non-Slav minorities. The Great Powers and the country's intellectual and political elites believed that a coherent identity could be formed in which the different South Slav groups in the state could identify with a single Balkan Yugoslav identity. Pieter Troch draws on previously unpublished sources from the domain of education to show how the state's nationalities policy initially allowed for a flexible and inclusive Yugoslav nationhood, and how that system was slowly replaced with a more domineering and rigid 'top-down' nationalism during the dictatorship of King Alexander I - who banned political parties and coded a strongly politicised Yugoslav national identity. As Yugoslav society became increasingly split between the 'pro-Yugoslav' central regime and 'anti-Yugoslav' opposition, the seeds were sown for the failure of the Yugoslav idea.
Nationalism and Yugoslavia provides a valuable new insight into the complexities of pre-war Yugoslavia.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

The idea that the South Slavs – speakers of South Slav languages, today categorised as Slovenes, Croats, Bosniaks, Serbs, Montenegrins, Macedonians, and Bulgarians – are part of a single overarching Yugoslav nation is one of the most intriguing features in the modern cultural and political history of the Balkans. The cultural and linguistic closeness of Bosniaks, Croats, Montenegrins, and Serbs in particular and the relevance of this commonality in the constellation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century politics make the Yugoslav idea logical from a nationalist point of view and explain the support it received throughout the modern period, yet the same period has also witnessed vehement national dissociations among South Slavs precisely over cultural and political divides. The ideal of Yugoslav national unification legitimised the establishment of the interwar Yugoslav kingdom and its socialist successor state, yet both states ended in nationally framed intercommunal conflicts. With the benefit of hindsight, the Yugoslav idea is all too easily discarded as insincere or naïve and doomed to fail. This book stems from the conviction that the inconsistencies between South Slav convergence and divergence can only be understood by turning away from the idea of the predetermined failure of the Yugoslav idea and looking closely at the institutionalisation of Yugoslav nationhood during the existence of the Yugoslav state.

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The Yugoslav idea had a long history predating the establishment of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes in 1918. During the nineteenth century, Yugoslavism complemented not only Croatian but also to a lesser extent Serbian and Slovenian national ideologies. Elements of Croat–Serb and South Slav unity occupied a central position in prominent intellectual, cultural, and political trends in the South Slav parts of the Habsburg Empire. The Illyrian Movement centred on a group of intellectuals in Zagreb during the 1830s and 1840s was the first significant cultural–political movement that took the idea of Croatian and South Slav cultural unity, essentially revolving around Croat–Serb linguistic unity, as the starting point for political and cultural demands. The political and cultural work of Bishop Josip Juraj Strossmayer continued the Yugoslav tradition in Croatia-Slavonia during the 1860s and 1870s.¹ A notion of South Slav unity also underpinned the Serbian national ideology of Vuk Karadžić, the founding father of modern Serbian language and literature in the first half of the nineteenth century, and Ilija Garašanin, the influential Minister of Foreign Affairs of autonomous Serbia around the mid-nineteenth century, as well as the ideology of the Croatian state rights promoted by Ante Starčević, the leading politician of exclusive Croatian nationalism in the second half of the nineteenth century.² Both expansionist ideologies made national claims to Croats, Serbs, and other South Slavs, although under different (Serbian and Croatian, respectively) national labels. In the sense that they considered Serbs and Croats part of one nation, they too subscribed to a form of South Slav unity. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the Yugoslav idea rose to prominence in the intellectual, cultural, and political life of the future Yugoslav lands. The most influential manifestations of the Yugoslav idea in this period were the growing regional popularity of independent Serbia as a result of its increasing international assertiveness during the Balkan Wars and World War I, the Yugoslav art of sculptor Ivan Meštrović, and the Croat–Serb political coalition in Croatia-Slavonia and Dalmatia.³

Within the general spirit of euphoria that accompanied the end of the Balkan Wars and World War I and the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, the majority of the political and cultural elites in the Yugoslav lands justified and welcomed the creation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes as a crucial step in the economic, political, and cultural modernisation of the Yugoslav lands and people. They closely connected this optimism with Yugoslav national liberation and unity, asserting that successful modernisation would go hand in hand with the strengthening of Yugoslav national consciousness and the national merging of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.

They were children of their time. Intellectual thinking after World War I had a strong faith in the nation-state as the best guarantee for emancipation, freedom, equality, and progress, at least in the European part of the globe. The new states of central and eastern Europe, successors to the multinational Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian empires, were invariably conceived as nation-states.⁴ The observation that even the internationalist Soviet Union promoted the national emancipation and consciousness of its constituent nations in soft-line policies to legitimise its authority and its communist project confirms the incredible force of national thinking in the period.⁵ Cultural and political elites justified the new nation-states as the perfect framework for the free and prosperous development of the delineated and uniform nations inhabiting the region. However, it would require a lot of work, intervention, patience, and frustration to make the broad masses conscious of their alleged intrinsic national identity and to realise claims about national homogeneity and clear national boundaries, as the nationalising states of western and central Europe had already experienced in the second half of the nineteenth century.⁶

Assertions of homogeneous national units simply did not match the enormous heterogeneity of the population of central and eastern Europe in terms of potential markers of national identity, such as race, ethnicity, language, historical identities, religion, or cultural practices. The painstaking process of living up to the claim of national unity and homogeneity that legitimated the popular authority of modern national states required nation building: the construction and propagation of a common national identity among a large majority of the population that would then ‘own’ the polity and popularly decide on its organisation. Harris Mylonas distinguishes between nation-building policies of ‘assimilation’, ‘accommodation’, and ‘exclusion’. Assimilation refers to policies aimed at the horizontal spread of the core group culture and way of life among targeted non-core groups (that is, parts of the nation that are considered deviant from the core group with regard to factors that constitute the nation's identity, for example language, religion, or ethnicity). It also implies the acquisition of the national culture among the whole population (that is, the vertical dissemination of a uniform, high national culture among all the projected members of the core nation, for example, the teaching of a standardised national language among all layers of the targeted nation). Accommodation keeps the difference between a non-core group and the core nation in place but produces ‘minorities’ that are clearly dissimilated from the national core and often discriminated against. Exclusion, finally, aims at the physical removal of a non-core group from the nation-state.⁷

The new national successor states in the Balkans faced a complex landscape of layered and overlapping ethnic, linguistic, socio-economic, and religious networks that served as concurring bases for collective identification. The interventions required by nation-states to make this landscape national were tremendous. All new states faced considerable non-core groups within the state. The states' policies toward these outsider groups ranged from the harsh and aggressive exclusionary and assimilationist measures during the Balkan Wars and World War I to the cautious and ad hoc manoeuvring with leeway for accommodation in the unstable and uncertain international environment of the 1920s. Reflecting a broader trend to subordinate individual rights to the interests of the nation-state in Europe, the authoritarian regimes of the 1930s turned to political repression, social control, and national homogenisation. This national homogenisation was expressed in a more repressive and decisive policy against symbolic markers of non-core ethnic identity, such as language, names of places and people, customs, and commemorative practices.⁸

The vertical and horizontal integration of the targeted nation required considerable re-imagination of national identity that led to critical disputes within the nation. The Turkification of Anatolia, for example, comprised the construction and dissemination of a secular Turkish culture among the broad masses that distanced conservative religious thinkers from the nation.⁹ The cultural offensive of Greater Romania to integrate its various composite parts – the Old Kingdom of Wallachia and Moldavia had acquired the new territories of southern Dobrudja, Transylvania, Bukovina, and Bessarabia, doubling its territory and population – exacerbated divisions within the nation-state, not only in the form of opposition from the discriminated ethnic minorities but also in regionalist particularism against the political and cultural hegemony of the Old Kingdom.¹⁰

The new states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia stand out from the other nationalising states in Central and Eastern Europe because of the composite character of the Czechoslovak and Yugoslav nations. Both states propagated the synthesis of established ‘tribes’ within an overarching nation, but the integration of the sub-groups in the nation remained complicated. The Czechoslovakist state ideology of the First Czechoslovak Republic revolved around the idea that Czechs and Slovaks together comprised a Czechoslovak nation with two ‘tribes’. The implementation of Czechoslovak national unity in politics and culture led to nationally framed internal disputes concerning the actual viability of Czechoslovak national unity. In the domain of politics, Slovak autonomists opposed the Czech-dominated centralist state organisation that had been installed as the political expression of Czechoslovak national unity. With regard to the cultural commonality that determined Czechoslovak national identity, Slovak–Czechoslovak discussions arose over the Czechoslovakist interpretation of history and the subordinate position of the codified Slovak language in the concrete implementation of the ‘Czechoslovak’ state language in public institutions and schools.¹¹

The establishment of Yugoslav political unity marked a similar turning point in the history of the Yugoslav idea. Instead of a far ideal in the comfortably distant future, Yugoslav national unification became an urgent challenge of the present leading to complex political and cultural discussions on the place of the three ‘tribes’ within the nation. Unlike the euphoric hopes of nationalist thinkers about an end time of national harmony and progress, the institutionalisation of Yugoslav nationhood brought about frictions that made the Yugoslav idea a more complicated matter than it had appeared at the time of the formation of the kingdom.

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The historiography of Yugoslavia has paid considerable attention to the Yugoslav national ideology of the Yugoslav Kingdom. In his influential study of the Yugoslav national question during the founding years of the interwar kingdom, Ivo Banac concludes that:

Yugoslavia's national question was the expression of the conflicting national ideologies that have evolved in each of its numerous national and confessional communities, reflecting the community's historical experiences. These ideologies had assumed their all but definitive contours well before the unification and could not be significantly altered by any combination of cajolery or coercion.¹²

The Yugoslav national aspirations of the state were unviable because they were ‘plainly opposed to the reality of Serb, Croat, and Slovene national individuality and moreover in contradiction to the empirically observable fact that these peoples were fully formed national entities of long standing’.¹³

Banac's conclusion perfectly represents the dominant strand in the historical thinking about the Yugoslav national idea in interwar Yugoslav politics. First, this line of reasoning takes for granted the competition between the Yugoslav national ideology and Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Montenegrin, Macedonian, and Muslim national identities. Yugoslavism was predestined to lose this battle because it simply came too late and did not rely on pre-modern ethnic identities, which had already crystallised into stable, longstanding, and empirically observable national identities. Second, Yugoslavism did not represent a sincere national movement – save for a few daydreamers – but was an instrument in the all-encompassing national conflict between especially Serbs and Croats.¹⁴ Finally, on top of the slim chances of the Yugoslav nation-building project, the misuse of Yugoslavism during the interwar period brought the idea to ruins and strengthened national polarisation in the country.

In the most sophisticated study of the Yugoslav idea in the politics of the interwar state, Jovo Bakić sees Yugoslavism as a form of pan-nationalism that constantly clashed with the specific political nationalist demands of Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, and Slovenian ethnicities. Referring to Anthony Smith's ethno-symbolist approach, Bakić argues that the political nationalist demands of the South Slav ethnicities only arose in the modern epoch but relied on ethnic identities from the pre-modern period. The South Slav pan-nationalist ideology could not fall back on a Yugoslav pre-modern ethnicity to provide the cultural resources that could back Yugoslav nationalist demands.¹⁵ Bakić in principle allows for an ‘historically functional’ understanding of Yugoslavism that could overcome ethnic conflict between South Slav ethnicities. In practice, however, the ‘historically dysfunctional’ Yugoslavism, which expressed hegemonic claims of one South Slav ethnicity over the others and masked the constant ethnic struggle between the South Slav ethnicities, dominated the political programmes of the first half of the twentieth century.¹⁶ Ethnic identities and conflicts thus formed ‘structural’ hindrances for Yugoslav national unity and predetermined the fate of Yugoslavism during the interwar period.

Studies of the cultural life in interwar Yugoslavia suggest, however, that Yugoslavism had a tremendous impact on the state's cultural politics, education system, and intellectual life, transcending that of a cover for Serbian political hegemony and a mere instrument in ethnic nationalist politics.¹⁷ Despite the short life and ultimate failure of the first Yugoslav state, these studies show that political and cultural elites articulated some constructive strategies for creating a Yugoslav national culture. Patterns from the political life of the First Yugoslavia cannot be directly transferred to the cultural aspects of nation building. Whereas Serbian domination in politics was undisputable, in the cultural domain ‘attempts at cultural Serbianization of Slovene and Croat cultures were far less frequent than the political situation might have led one to expect’.¹⁸ Moreover, Dejan Djokić recently refuted the dominant assessment of interwar Yugoslav politics as a clear-cut dichotomy between Croatian and Serbian national identities, describing recurring attempts by Serbian and Croatian political representatives to reach a political compromise during the interwar period. In this line of reasoning, he has made a strong claim against the ‘ethnicist’ understanding of the Yugoslav national question, debating whether ‘Serbian and Croatian nationalisms had been formed by 1918, and whether they remained immune to evolution following the creation of Yugoslavia’.¹⁹ Drawing on these findings on the dynamic interaction between the state's Yugoslav ideology and established Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian (and other particularist) identities, this book reconnects the cultural and political sides of the institutionalisation of the Yugoslav idea in order to reach a balanced assessment of the significance of interwar Yugoslav nation building.

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In the theoretical and methodological field, this book questions the stable and predetermined incompatibility of Yugoslavism and fully fledged national identities in the region that other scholars of Yugoslavia's national question have taken for granted. It is inspired by theoretical writings on nationhood as a fluid, dynamic, and multifaceted category of practice. Rogers Brubaker has offered a convincing critique of the ‘realist’ understanding of nations that takes over the nationalist understanding of nations as ‘internally homogeneous, externally bounded groups, even unitary collective actors with common purposes’.²⁰ Brubaker instead proposes a focus on nationhood as a conceptual variable, institutional form, practical category, contingent event, cultural idiom. Nations are no ‘substantial, enduring collectivities’ but ‘widely, if unevenly, available and resonant… categor[ies] of social vision and division’ that are ‘pervasively institutionalized in the practice of states and the workings of the state system’ and which ‘may suddenly, and powerfully “happen”’.²¹ Instead of asking ‘what is a nation?’, Brubaker suggests that we analyse the institutionalisation of...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• Part 1 The Framework: Yugoslavism, Politics, and Education
• Part 2 The Possibilities: The Inclusive Approach to Yugoslav National Identity
• Part 3 The Limitations: Exclusionary Understandings of Yugoslav Nationhood
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Back cover