Relying heavily on the work of Edward Shils, this paper argues that a robust sense of national identity among the peoples of East Central Europe played a crucial role in the revolutions of 1989 and the subsequent emergence of civil society in the region's countries.
The previous essays have presented a (frequently tragic) history of the Muslims of Southeastern Europe. The development of national identities among the Muslim populations has been an important chapter in this story. A recurring theme in the different case studies presented in this special issue is that the ways in which the Balkan Muslim population perceived itself did not always match the perception of the Christian population, especially the nationalists. Likewise, while the non-Muslim population often considered all Muslims to be an undifferentiated mass (usually referred to as “Turks”), the Muslims themselves often had highly nuanced and complex self-perception. While this self-identification included Islam as an important component, Islam was by no means the only, or even most important, aspect of identity.
The Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes inherited a considerable number of Germans along with its ex-Habsburg territories when it was established in December 1918. The two most important German communities in inter-war Yugoslavia were the Germans of Slovenia and the Germans of the Vojvodina and Croatia-Slavonia, the so-called Donau Schwaben (Swabians). There were also scattered pockets of ethnic Germans in Bosnia-Hercegovina. The Yugoslavian ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche), like the other Yugoslavian non-Slav minorities, were objects of discrimination by the Yugoslavian government. The Slovenian German community responded to this hostility by developing a virulent German nationalism which, after 1933, rapidly turned into Nazism. The Swabian community, on the other hand, generally tried to cooperate with the central government in Belgrade. The Swabians remained rather ambivalent toward the rising Nazi movement until the tremendous successes of the Third Reich in 1938 made Nazism irresistibly attractive. In the face of the government's anti-German policies, why did each of these German communities manifest such different attitudes towards the Yugoslav state during the inter-war period? This article will show how several factors of history, demography, and geography combined to produce the different reactions of the two groups.
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