World War II and the National Question: The Origins of the Autonomous Status of Vojvodina in Yugoslavia

Abstract

This article investigates the origins of the autonomous status of Vojvodina in postwar Serbia and Yugoslavia. It charts the formation of national and regional consciousness among Vojvodina's Serbs, Germans and Hungarians, from Habsburg times to the Second World War. It then argues that Nazi Germany's racial war radicalised national tensions in Vojvodina. Nazi defeat resulted in the brutal expulsion of Vojvodina's Germans, making Serbs for the first time a majority. The region's claim to autonomous status after the war therefore clashed with the national-territorial principle applied to federalism by the victorious Communist Party of Yugoslavia, causing frequent friction and instability. Article 1 The borderlands of Eastern Europe and the Balkans witnessed violent processes of nation-state formation in the nineteenth and particularly the twentieth centuries. War and revolution in these areas of mixed population were the road from imperial domination to independent statehood. In The Lands Between (Prusin, 2011), Alexander V. Prusin shows the borderlands between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia moving towards inter-ethnic

Producing and Maintaining Minority “Groupness” through State Effects: Teaching in Croatian in Serbia

“…It was considered by many living there to be more European than other parts of Serbia, and it contained a large number of minority identified individuals, often being referred to as a multicultural area with friendly relations among these groups (Archer and Rácz 2012). Vojvodina was an autonomous province for many years and consisted of an area that was formerly part of Austro-Hungary, while certain regions were part of the Axis-controlled Croatian, Hungarian, and Serbian states (Unkovski-Korica 2016) during World War II, and were subject to radical Serbian, Croatian, and Hungarian nationalist claims over large parts of the territory. In this vein, teaching in Croatian was positioned by Bunjevac non-Croatian activists as linking into an expansive project of a greater Croatia: The aspiration of the Croatian state-national interest towards north-west Bačka refers to the ethnic identity of Bunjevci as a “branch of Croatian clan” supporting this argument with the origins of Bunjevci in Bačka—countries of ancient (mythic) Red Croatia (Herzegovina, Dalmatia).…”