The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics

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Cornell University Press, 2 févr. 1988 - 456 pages
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Even before it collapsed into civil war, ethnic cleansing, and dissolution, Yugoslavia was an archetypical example of a troubled multinational mosaic, a state without a single national base or even a majority. Its stability and very existence were challenged repeatedly by the tension between the pressures for overarching political cohesion and the defense of separate national identities and aspirations.

In a brilliant analysis of this complex and sensitive national question, Ivo Banac provides a comprehensive introduction to Yugoslav political history. His book is a genetic study of the ideas, circumstances, and events that shaped the pattern of relations among the nationalities of Yugoslavia. It traces and analyzes the history and characteristics of South Slavic national ideologies, connects these trends with Yugoslavia's flawed unification in 1918, and ends with the fatal adoption of the centralist system in 1921.

Banac focuses on the first two and a half years in the history of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, because in his view this was the period that set the pattern for subsequent development of the national question. The issues that divided the South Slavs, and that still divide them today, took on definite form during that time, he maintains. Banac provides extensive treatment of all of Yugoslavia's nationalities; his sections on the Montenegrins, Albanians, Macedonians, and Bosnian Muslims are unique in the literature. In this unbiased account, all of the principals and groups assume a tragic fascination.

When published in 1984, The National Question in Yugoslavia was the first complete introduction to the cultural history of the South Slavic peoples and to the politics of Yugoslavia, and it remains a major contribution to the scholarship on modern European nationalism and the stability of multinational states.

 

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Page 296 - Houses and whole villages reduced to ashes, unarmed and innocent populations massacred en masse, incredible acts of violence, pillage and brutality of every kind — such were the means which were employed and are still being employed by the Serbo-Montenegrin soldiery, with a view to the entire transformation of the ethnic character of regions inhabited exclusively by Albanians.
Page 410 - A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour.
Page 328 - A nation is not merely a historical category but a historical category belonging to a definite epoch, the epoch of rising capitalism. The process of elimination of feudalism and development of capitalism was at the same time a process of amalgamation of people into nations.
Page 132 - Serbia wants to liberate and unite the Yugoslavs and does not want to drown in the sea of some kind of Yugoslavia. Serbia does not want to drown in Yugoslavia, but to have Yugoslavia drown in...
Page 307 - Macedonia Round the Struma and the Vardar a lovely flower blooms, it is the flower of the Serbian tsar: the holy blossom of Tsar Dusan. Round the Struma and the Vardar bloom the flowers of the Serbian tsar. — Stevan Kacanski, 1885 (Banac, 1984, p.
Page 80 - Serb ideology, the purpose of which was to assimilate the vast majority of Catholic Croats and all Bosnian Muslims, whose dialects were akin to the Stokavian subdialects spoken by...
Page 414 - On the other hand, dear boundaries between the segments of a plural society have the advantage of limiting mutual contacts and consequently of limiting the chances of ever-present potential antagonisms to erupt into actual hostility.
Page 226 - Radk:'s famous speech to the Central Committee on November 24, 1918: Gentlemen, . . . you think that it is enough to say that we Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes are one people because we speak one language, and that on account of this we must also have a unitary centralist state, moreover a kingdom. . . . [Y]ou evidently do not care a whit that our peasant in general, and especially our Croat peasant, does not wish to hear one more thing about kings and emperors, nor about a state which you are imposing...
Page 123 - Declaration, proclaimed the determination of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes to form a united and independent state...

Références à ce livre

Nationalism
Craig J. Calhoun
Aucun aperçu disponible - 1997
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À propos de l'auteur (1988)

Ivo Banac is Bradford Durfee Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University.

Informations bibliographiques