The National Question in Yugoslavia

The Croatian historical statehood narrative

“…Ivo Banac contended that, with the death of the last Croatian king, the crown simply passed into royal Hungarian hands as the nearest blood relation to the Croatian Trpimir dynasty. 42 The existence of such an agreement, and the accuracy of these Croatian claims, is partially supported by evidence of early practices in the 'union'. First, during the first two centuries of the union there were separate crowning ceremonies, one ceremony for the crowning of the King of Hungary and one for the crowning of the King of Croatia.…”

“…Unlike some other writers, Banac does not believe that these Slavs were sub-divided into pre-national groupings such as Slovenes, Serbs and Croats. 7 Other writers, however, contend that it is possible to distinguish the Croats from other Slavic groups and, as we shall see later, this is vital to accounts that attempt to trace Croatian national identity back to a prior ethnic group. Marcus Tanner used texts ascribed to Emperor Heraclius to suggest that the Croats began inhabiting the provinces of Pannonia and Dalmatia after the sack of Split by the Avars in  614.…”

“…This programme, which also articulated a linguistic alternative to Hungarian and Latin, began in the 1830s and 1840s and became known as the Illyrian movement. 85 Initially, Illyrianism was a cultural movement inspired by the poetry of Ljudevit Gaj and Janko Draskoviç, but after 1841 it became the dominant political and national ideology among intellectuals and the bourgeois strata of Croatian society under the tutelage of Bishop Josip Strossmayer.…”

“…Although the Illyrianists sought to unite the Southern Slav people, they still maintained the principle of Croatia's right to statehood. 97 This was unacceptable to the Serbs, who envisaged a possible Yugoslav state as more akin to a 'Greater Serbia' than the loose federation envisaged by the Illyrianists. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the 1840s the movement became a fully fledged political party whose programme consisted of the establishment of ‡tokavian as a literary language for the southern Slavs, the unification of all Croatian lands within the Habsburg Monarchy, and the attainment of closer ties with Bosnia-Hercegovina, Serbia and Bulgaria.…”

“…This 'primary acquisition' established 'the eternal and natural Croat right to ownership of the land'. 105 The only political movement to command substantial support outside the economic and intellectual elite was Stjepan Radiç's Croatian Peasant Party, which competed its first election in 1905. 106 Radiç was convinced that the future belonged to the Croatian peasantry and espoused both the doctrine of Croatia's state-right and the continuation of the Habsburg Monarchy, albeit a reformed Monarchy that would be both democratic and federal.…”