5 - The South Slavs

Summary

It may seem strange to place a discussion of ex-Yugoslavia between western Europe and Africa, but it is not without its point. We are once more seeking to explain the relationship between ethnicity, nationhood and nationalism in the light of territoriality, language, literature and religion through examination of a much disputed group of examples. The group consists of the South Slavs apart from Bulgaria and Macedonia, that is to say the inhabitants of Slovenia, Croatia, Herzegovina (formerly Hum), Bosnia, Montenegro and Serbia. Are they so many nations? If so, when, why and how did they become so? H. Kohn, in his standard (though now quite dated) work of fifty years ago, The Idea of Nationalism, had this to say of their early nineteenth-century state: ‘The southern Slavs, divided according to historical regions rather than ethnographic principles, without a uniform language and spelling, were no more than ethnographic raw material out of which nationalities could grow.’ Against that let us place a document published in London in May 1915 entitled a Jugoslav Manifesto to the British Nation'. It was an appeal to Britain to recognise that Serbia's war with Austria-Hungary was one of emancipation intended to free and unite ‘the Jugoslav nation’. The Serbs, Croats and Slovenes inhabiting Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia-Slavonia-Dalmatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Carniola and much else ‘form a single nation, alike by identity of language, by the unanswerable laws of geography and by national consciousness’.