On 12 January 1909, the State Attorney for the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia issued an indictment for the crime of high treason against fifty-three men, the majority of whom were members of the Serbian Independent Party.Footnote 1 They were charged with propagating and pursuing, in collaboration with members of political circles in the Kingdom of Serbia, the unification of the provinces of Croatia and Slavonia, Dalmatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina with the Kingdom of Serbia, and thus the creation of “Greater Serbia.” The indictment claimed that the accused had misled members of the “Greek-Eastern” religion, telling them that they were of Serbian nationality and identical to the people of the Kingdom of Serbia. They performed this by organizing and bringing together—economically, politically, and nationally—everything that was called “Serbian,” by negating the “Croatian” name, and by generally boycotting everything that was not “Serbian.” Furthermore, the indictment claimed that, until recently, among the broader strata of the “Greek-Eastern” population, there had been no awareness of the existence of a Serbian name and no identification of the “Greek-Eastern” denomination in Croatia and Slavonia with Serbian nationality in any symbolic way. The reasoning was that this population was of varied descent (“Vlacho-Romanian,” “Greek” or “autochthonous,” while only a small part was “Serbian”) and had therefore been assimilated with the “domestic autochthonous element.”Footnote 2
Consequently, near the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, contrary to the widely accepted institutional and public discourse about ethnic or national groups and nationalization of the masses in the Habsburg monarchy, we encounter an indictment, issued by the highest judicial body, that negates the existence of any mass identification of the population with the Serbian nationality and even negates the existence of a widespread Serbian ethnicity, considering it all a treasonous import of those political circles that supported the rival Kingdom of Serbia and its geopolitical interests. All this was occurring in the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia, where we can find the existence of political parties bearing the Serbian name since the end of the period of Habsburg neoabsolutism, numerous cultural and economic associations with the Serbian name, and the Serbian Orthodox Church organization, which has been gathering its congregation under its national name since 1868.
In this article, I use the high treason indictment as a starting point for reflecting on the important issue of Serbian nationality in the period preceding World War I and analyze this issue by using Croatia and Slavonia as a case study. I argue that the ethnic boundaries of the “Serbian community” in Croatia and Slavonia in this period became more salient, important, and had a broader population basis than before, but at the same time, this neither prevented contestations over the meanings and political implications of those boundaries, nor abolished the space for local negotiations over the boundary's significance in everyday situations.
When putting forward such a thesis, one might ask how important the categories of “Orthodox” and “Serbs” were in the political arena of the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia, and how important they were for the population assigned to these categories. Was the national category of “Serbness” really imported from abroad and used for antimonarchial political aims, or was its political salience and claims of cultural distinctiveness rather the product of the dualist Austro-Hungarian state and social system? Had the population in fact followed rather different types of everyday identifications and group loyalties, ones that were not primarily attached along ethnic and national lines? Such complex questions, which involve analyzing the phenomena of ethnic and national categorization and identification as well as the questions regarding the creation of the institutional framework of their organization and prominence in everyday life, are difficult to answer in one article. Therefore, I will attempt only to sketch possible paths toward finding answers to the raised questions and prove my thesis by selecting relevant examples and interpreting them in accordance with new studies on nationalism and ethnicity
Events like the high treason trial were a political process and sought to impose the ideology of “Croatian state rights,” according to which the “Croatian political nation” exclusively inhabited Croatia and Slavonia.Footnote 3 Taking place during the Bosnian Annexation Crisis, the high treason trial was the result of the intersection of the interests of the ruling circles in Vienna, the Hungarian government, and a combination of local political actors from all political levels, from the highest circles of the monarchy to provincial political interests.Footnote 4 The indictment reflected the ongoing process of affiliation of members of the “Greek-Eastern” population category with Serbian ethnicity and the Serbian nation. In doing so, it stated concerns and conceptualized the phenomenon that Rogers Brubaker has termed “territorial nationality,” which “involves claims for … symbolic recognition as a state-bearing nation rather than as a mere ‘minority,’ for territorial autonomy or even full independence, and sometimes for rapprochement with a neighboring ‘kin’ or ‘homeland’ state” as well as for various cultural rights.Footnote 5 Thus the population categorized as “Orthodox” according to the religious criterion became part of the broader anti-Serbian discourse, which culminated in the outbreak of World War I, when it was labeled by the highest authorities in the monarchy, principally military circles, as a collective threat to the monarchy's existence.Footnote 6 The 1909 indictment contained bourgeois discourse that promulgated the topoi of the “intelligentsia” as a carrier of group identities and a propagator of (in this case treasonous) ideas, on the one hand, and of “uneducated masses,” vulnerable to manipulation, or “maddening,” on the other. Consequently, the claims from 1914 about the “Serbian” population as a potentially massively disloyal element would imply the exceptional success of Serbian propaganda. Such implications also stemmed from the changes in the political field in Croatia and Slavonia at the turn of the century, which began to emphasize more strongly the importance of everyday social and economic issues of the population, which in turn influenced conceptions of how this type of politics should be led, basic political messages and tasks, and the recipients that needed to be reached. As I argue, the linking of these political imperatives to the promotion of the ethnic and national identifications and loyalties among the populace was incentivized by the institutional and political system of Austria-Hungary.
Serbian nationalist activists vehemently refuted charges contained in the indictment. In doing so, they were paradoxically and simultaneously confirming those claims to a certain extent by acknowledging their own work in awakening the “Serbian consciousness.” For example, in a book published in defense of the defendants at the trial, Radoslav Grujić argued the long existence of the Serbian people as a well-defined and organized entity, who had settled in Hungary and Croatia and Slavonia in compact groups, characterized by their own language, religion, and specific church organization.Footnote 7 He also argued that, from these determinants, the Serbian people had grounds for claiming their cultural and political rights on the territory they inhabited.Footnote 8 The principal defendant at the high treason trial, Adam Pribićević, made the same assumptions of the long existence of Serbian ethnicity. By contrast, he also acknowledged that Serbian consciousness had just started to awaken, and that Serbian nationalist activists were spreading the Serbian name and symbols among the people who, as the activists believed, primordially belonged to the Serbian ethnicity. Pribićević considered this to be the justified, and not treacherous, aim of Serbian political parties, just like the aim of Croatian political parties was to awaken Croatian consciousness.Footnote 9 So, the first defendant at the high treason trial, a man who without doubt supported the nationalist agenda of the reification of ethnic groups as natural and essential forms of self-consciousness and as pivotal social forms, admitted that the consciousness of the ethnic and national community, of which he was a zealous protagonist, was still in the process of spreading.
The notion of the recent ethnicization and nationalization of Orthodox population, as claimed by the indictment and partly acknowledged by Serbian national activists, somewhat contradicts accounts made by the political protagonists of the 1860s. For example, the declarations of the Croatian Parliament from 1861 and 1867 acknowledged the existence of the Serbian people in the Triune Kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia, albeit with some hesitation about deciding whether they were “identical” or “of equal rights” to the Croatian people.Footnote 10 Furthermore, the statements made in 1863 in the then most important newspaper Pozor (Attention) claimed that a majority of the Serbs had until recently referred to themselves using provincial names, but that the people of Orthodox faith had now awakened and consequently referred to themselves using their national Serbian name.Footnote 11 One of Hungary's most prominent Serbian politicians, Mihailo Polit-Desančić, came to a similar conclusion in the late 1870s, when he declared in the Hungarian Parliament that the Serbs and Croats were one people because they have the same language, but that the Serbs have managed to preserve their nationality better.Footnote 12 Even Mirjana Gross, who conducted a detailed historiographic analysis of the ambiguous relations between politicians in the 1860s and 1870s who strove to identify and define the group whom they politically represented and in whose name they spoke, concluded that the “flow of Croatian national integration was slower than the Serbian one.”Footnote 13 Such historiographic assessments sometimes ignored the fact that the mentioned early successes of “national integrations” were often merely an intellectual construction of a relatively thin layer of highly educated citizenry, who took up the role of the political elite and signifiers of the societal dimension of the group they represented in a postfeudal society.
The now already classic concept of researching “Croatian” and “Serbian” “national integration,” with its functionalistic, deterministic, and teleological admixtures, has become analytically too rigid. More recent historiography strives to deconstruct and make less deterministic our understanding of the process of the nationalization of the population or the politicization of ethnicity. It also aims to go beyond covering the entire social space of the second half of the nineteenth century with clear and distinctive ethnic and national identities.Footnote 14 Moreover, the concept of “national integration” carries with it the problem of falling into the trap of ethnicism, often repeating at its heart the very discourse used by the nationalists, who should be the object of research and analysis. As Jeremy King has argued, “[E]thnicism is a vague, largely implicit framework that holds the nations of East Central Europe to have sprung primarily from a specific set of mass, mutually exclusive ethnic groups defined by inherited cultural and linguistic patterns.”Footnote 15 He also noticed that ethnicists’ approaches shed much light on the nationalization of political structures but that they explain the development of national consciousness (the nationalization of individuals) in a systematically flawed fashion.Footnote 16 This echoes Brubaker's famous call to be aware of the reification of ethnic groups, or “the tendency to represent the social and cultural world as a multi-chrome mosaic of monochrome ethnic, racial, or cultural blocs.”Footnote 17 However, Andreas Wimmer argues that successful political mobilization along ethnic lines neither encompasses the whole ethnic group, nor should it be simply ascribed to manipulation by political elites. “Radical constructivism,” as he calls it, is often obsessed with exorcising essentialism, reification, and objectification from the study of ethnicity, though in some contexts “ethnicity has become a master principle of social organization that structures individuals’ life chances systematically.”Footnote 18 Moreover, in his more recent work, Brubaker, after a “microanalytic turn,” returned to “meso- and macroanalytic levels of analysis,” advocating, among other things, a more sophisticated analysis of the “single modernity” perspective, with the goal of better understanding specific manifestations of nationalism and politicized ethnicity “as basic principles of vision and division of the social world, as fundamental ways of identifying self and other, and as elementary templates of making claims.”Footnote 19
Contextualizing Serbian “Grounds for Difference” in the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia
Historiography of the late Habsburg monarchy, which has over the last decades begun to point to the situational, relational, and contingent nature of groups, and therefore also ethnic and national identities and identifications, has for the most part focused on multilingual areas. However, the area covered in this article was monolingual but biconfessional, in which the confessional difference of Catholicism and Orthodoxy transformed itself into the basis for ethnic categorization, construction, and presentation of distinctive ethnic and national identities.Footnote 20 This is important to highlight because it seems that eminent researchers who deconstruct the ethnicist approach to analyzing multilingual areas presuppose a stronger influence of religion on the phenomena of identification and creating group identities. For instance, Johannes Feichtinger and Gary Cohen accept Pieter Judson's belief that “national loyalties were never as deeply rooted as were other forms of self-identification (e.g., religion).”Footnote 21 Judson notes that in Galicia and Bukovina, for example, “religious differences created more of a sense of distinct local cultures,” though he stresses that even these were often overcome by common cultural characteristics.Footnote 22 He also claims that “religious diversity, for example, was often a far better predictor of local perceptions of cultural difference in rural Austria than was linguistic diversity.”Footnote 23
Does this suggest that the perception of cultural difference based on confessional difference had a stronger influence on predetermining the ethnic categories, identities, and therefore the identification of the population on the area of Croatia and Slavonia? We can begin a more nuanced consideration of this matter than in standard depictions and analyses if we attempt to apply criteria of analysis of the construction of group identity categories, identities, and identifications that are used for multilingual areas. Therefore, in the vein of geographer George W. White, I postulate that, in Croatia and Slavonia (as well as in the broader South Slavic area with a multiconfessional population), religion per se did not determine ethnic categories but was used as the main social characteristic of their distinction.Footnote 24
This process of distinguishing a population according to ethnic and national markers in the area of Croatia and Slavonia followed the general trends in the Habsburg monarchy. King writes that, with the emergence of the modern doctrine of popular sovereignty in the Habsburg monarchy, “[i]n this clash among non-Habsburg populist principles of political legitimacy,” the principle of “nationhood had triumphed in East Central Europe, generically if not specifically” narrowing choices for individuals.Footnote 25 In the case of the Serbian nationalist populist movement, it was precisely confession—that is its ecclesiastical organization—which beginning from the late seventeenth century maintained its jurisdiction over the Orthodox population on the basis of imperial privileges, that served as the main repository for arguments on the cultural identity and criteria of belonging to the Serbian ethnic community in Hungary and Croatia and Slavonia. The key incentive to this was given by the Hungarian Parliament in 1868, when it recognized Serbian national-ecclesiastical autonomy, which reached beyond the boundaries of Hungary and Croatia and Slavonia and had the right to manage the religious, spiritual, and educational affairs of a population that it characterized as “Serbian Orthodox.” As Nicholas Miller has pointed out, concerning the second half of the nineteenth century, “[E]ventually, as identity became less a function of status and faith and more of ethnicity and culture, this autonomous cultural existence would provide the basis for a thriving Serbian community, and even its claims for political self-determination.”Footnote 26
Autonomy served as the basis for this, but the constitutional framework of the Hungarian half of the monarchy also facilitated it. Even in the Austrian half of the monarchy, constitutional basis rested on, among other things, the principles of equality between nations (in the sense of citizens of various nationalities with equal rights, and not as collective entities). In practice, as time went by, the process of “ethnicization” became more and more prominent, and it was precisely the belonging to an ethnically defined collective that became increasingly important in organizing one's life.Footnote 27 Hungary, however, was proclaimed a unitary national state of the “Hungarian political nation” in 1867, albeit with the recognition of the existence of nationalities in the sense of minority groups. Although minority groups did not enjoy the full recognition of their rights, the state did recognize individual's right to express his nationality. As Judson summarizes, the Hungarian political class viewed the Compromise with the emperor as confirmation of the historical independence of Hungary from the other Habsburg lands, while the Compromise with Croatia confirmed the latter's historical constitutional relationship with Hungary: “In both cases, however, the political demands of modern nationhood soon overwhelmed traditional arguments about national sovereignty. Constitutional questions became increasingly bound up with national cultural concerns, which were increasingly expressed in ethnic terms to make them more persuasive.”Footnote 28 This is why constitutional matters, related to the questions of nationality and its significance, had precedence over other social and economic questions and in practice produced a policy of Hungarization, ethnically defined and alienating for many segments of society. The limited electoral rights in the Kingdom of Hungary also influenced this orientation of the political scene.Footnote 29
Because it was a “minority partner” in the Kingdom of Hungary, the political class of Croatia and Slavonia had less power and thus had a lower level of confidence but a greater sense of victimization. The problem of the constitutional status of Croatia and Slavonia in Hungary and the monarchy, and the possibilities and ways of its resolution in a more favorable manner, constantly framed political discussions in Croatia and Slavonia. A favorable resolution to this question for Croatia and Slavonia—around which several political orientations, tactics, and practices were based—was seen as a necessary prerequisite to solve the problem of the province's stagnant economic and social development. Within the limited political, social, and economic capabilities of Croatian self-government and the relatively high level of dependence on the Hungarian center, the estate-based concept of Croatia and Slavonia as the “Croatian political nation,” recognized by the Compromise in circumstances of the general “culturization” of politics in the monarchy, caused political cleavages around the question of who exactly belongs to the “political nation” and which way they need to be defined and qualified.Footnote 30 These cleavages, specifically in the case of the building and presentation of a distinctive Serbian national community, were rooted in the Hungarian Constitution and the notion that national-ecclesiastical autonomy acted as an institutionally and culturally cohesive factor and consequently influenced the “emergence of a society that starts dividing itself along confessional lines and producing parallel political claims; these contrasting interpretations of how to define the Croatian political body are at the center of the conflict between Croats and Serbs.”Footnote 31
However, the question of building distinctive ethnic categories and identities in the Croatian-Serbian case is made even more complex by the fact that the protagonists—who presented themselves and were institutionally recognized as representatives of their ethnic communities (through elections, participation in government organs on various levels, and participation in civil organizations built on the ethnic principle)—had phases of not only conflict but also cooperation. Here we can differentiate between the space of practical political, social, and cultural activity and the space of ideological production of meaning, which was supposed to explain, direct, and interpret this practical activity. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the former passed through several general phases that were characterized by either conflict or cooperation between Croatian- and Serbian-defined political actors, in which the Hungarian government—always a divisive factor—also played an important role. A whole complex of specific relations was present within these general phases, as it was among the representatives of the Croatian and Serbian national community, which were dependent on a series of structural (social, economic, regional), but also situational, contingent factors. In accordance with this, sometimes influencing practical social activity, and sometimes reacting to it, the ideological construction of reality changed and adapted itself.
However, following the typology of ideologies offered by Siniša Malešević, I believe it is possible to speak of the existence of a normative and operational ideology in the case of Croatian and Serbian nationalist protagonists.Footnote 32 The first was inclusive and under the influence of the dominant understanding that ethnicity and nationality are defined through language. Owing to this then universally accepted intellectual criterion, which was adopted by the educated citizenry, a fundamental ethnic dividing line between Croats and Serbs could not be drawn, which is why different forms of defining and naming one's belonging to a Croatian or Serbian national community as well as different visions of the relationship between the two developed. However, the formulation of operational ideology depended on reality, in other words on the possibility of the actor creating or using it to realize their interests through characteristics that could be substantiated institutionally or culturally and historically. And it is here that, in our case, we once again find confession as a decisive factor in creating ethnic categories in the Croat-Serb case.
To reconceptualize the mentioned problems and offer a potential theoretical-interpretative frame for understanding their genesis and development, I will make use of the work of Andreas Wimmer. He considers the concepts of “cultural compromise” and “social closure” to be the most important characteristics of modern societies. In Nationalist Exclusion and Ethnic Conflict: Shadows of Modernity, Wimmer postulates: “A cultural compromise emerges when the actors sharing a communicative space can agree that certain values are valuable and that certain modes of classifying the social world make sense.”Footnote 33 This entails a discussion about meaning, in which individuals of various economic, social, and cultural positions can begin considering a certain vision of the social world as making sense. It is also significant that this consensus does not take place completely in the world of rational decisions, but also depends on the already established and internalized modes of meaning. This is why cultural compromise exists in manifold interpretations and variations and is malleable, depending on power relations. In addition, “Those that have taken part in the negotiation process stabilise the achieved compromise by closing their ranks, controlling access to the group and marking its boundaries with diacritic elements…The realization of these principles through institutions of boundary maintenance is…a process of social closure. It can lead to the establishment of ethnic groups, nations, social classes, estates, village communities and so on.”Footnote 34 In my case study, it is important to keep in mind Wimmer's thesis that the process of nationalization “depends on a successful compromise between the new state elites and the various component parts of society: an exchange of loyalty for participation, equal treatment before the law and the symbolic capital associated with the rise from plebs to nation. If the state's elite are unable to provide these collective goods to the whole population of the national state, similar processes of social closure to develop on a subnational, ethnic basis.”Footnote 35
What follows from this is that “[t]he polity will then be fragmented into ethnic groups perceiving themselves as communities of shared destiny and political solidarity … [E]thnic ties become the channels through which the new elites distribute the collective goods of the modern state in order to legitimize their rule … In this way, the diffusion and rooting of a national identity is undermined, and ethnic groups are transformed into communities of political interest.”Footnote 36 In the context of the dominant Hungarian ruling political class's aspiration toward the “Hungarization” of the Hungarian state, as well as the weakness and compromised nature of Croatia and Slavonia's self-government and its inability to offer a coherent, believable, and sustainable vision of the “Croatian political nation,” theoretical conceptualizations such as Wimmer's can help us to comprehend the genesis of ethnic categories and identities as well as the politicization of ethnicity as the basic principle of dividing the social world and a model for formulating and implementing political and social demands.
Ethnic and National Categories, Identities, and Their Recipients
Wimmer believes that political mobilization never encompasses an entire ethnic group (or, I would add, all those individuals who, according to the legitimized vision and division of the social world, should belong to a certain ethnic group), but that successful mobilization needs support “from below.”Footnote 37 Thus, the important issue of the ethnicization of individuals, their reception of ethnic categorization, and their adherence to ethnic groups remains. In this respect, Stefano Petrungaro's groundbreaking historical work on the territory of Croatia and Slavonia are especially significant with respect to the category of the “Orthodox” population. By and large, the population of this category inhabited the peculiar territory of Military Border, which had been cut off from the ongoing political and social processes until 1881, when it was integrated into the province of Croatia and Slavonia. Petrungaro argues that, “[O]ver the centuries, a collective sense of identification was formed, connected to the territory and the social role of its inhabitants. With the dissolution of Military Border, this hetero- and auto-identification became anachronous and had to cede its power to the new identities that were slowly situating themselves in the politics and the imaginarium of that time. In national terms, the Croatian and Serbian national identities were offered ‘from above.’”Footnote 38 By studying social protests in a Croatian rural setting, Petrungaro notices that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, “peasants’ awareness of the cultural, institutional and political landscape in Croatia was increased … symbolic targets were identified more clearly than in the past, and consensual meaning was attributed to the symbols involved.”Footnote 39 In addition, “[A]rticulated collective rituals took place, which merged social, cultural, national and religious issues.”Footnote 40 This was also an answer to a new political style, which started to pay attention to the social and economic issues of rural areas, linking them with new types of identifications and loyalties.Footnote 41 However, Petrungaro warns that “peasants were not simply passive targets of the new policies. On one hand, they delivered an ‘active’ reaction to the socio-political novelties, providing their own interpretation of political symbols, while on the other hand, they were sometimes unable to clearly recognize and deal with the modern political imagery, leaving room for identificational uncertainties and ambiguities.”Footnote 42
This new type of politics at the turn of the century sought to abandon the almost exclusive focus on endless discussions about the constitutional position of Croatia and the defining of Croatian-Serbian relations and instead to devote itself to practical work among the broader social strata. This entailed the establishment and strengthening of a series of economic and cultural institutions, which had the goal of influencing the poor socioeconomic status of the predominantly rural and agrarian population and the more successful adaptation to a modern, individualized socioeconomic order. However, inability, and sometimes reluctance, of the provincial governments to offer access to “collective goods” (i.e., socioeconomic infrastructure, political representation) to a large part of the population, incentivized the appearance of institutions that defined their potential clientele on an ethnic basis. Miller, thus, stresses that “for the most part, and especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, these institutions were viewed by their founders as ammunition in a battle to maintain the nation,” and, regarding the issue of Serbian institutions, concludes: “Together, the banking institutions, publishing companies, and party organizations served to segregate Serbs from their neighbors and inculcate an insular sense of community. They also promoted often vicious political confrontations within the Serbian community, confrontations that were partly ideological and partly practical.”Footnote 43 The Serbian political parties in the beginning of the twentieth century disagreed over issues of cooperation with Croatian parties, how to resolve the position of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia (not only the province of Croatia and Slavonia, but also the Triune Kingdom, an entity that would also encompass Dalmatia), and most importantly, the position and rights of Serbs within their borders. What they had in common, and what is most important for the purposes of this article, was that they were fighting for the support of the same population, ethnically defined as “Serbian-Orthodox,” linking it to the broader Serbian national community. Furthermore, owing in large part to the pressures manifested in the high treason trial after 1908, the Serbian Independent Party—which unlike the rival Radical Party was normatively based on the principles of the “national unity” of Croats and Serbs and advocated a more modern conception of individual civil rights and political participation—began to move toward a policy of “collective defense.”Footnote 44
The specific confluence of events that took place from 1908 until 1914 worked in favor of the basic intention of Serbian national activists to spread Serbian national consciousness, as Adam Pribićević declared. The high treason trial; the repeated dissolutions of the Parliament and the conducting of new elections; the introduction of a state of constitutional emergency and the establishment of the Commissariat in 1912–13; the abolition of Serbian national-ecclesiastical autonomy in 1912; and the Balkan Wars were all situational factors in which the threat and contestation of Serbian ethnicity and nationality in the monarchy could be discerned, and these problems were linked to the unfavorable socioeconomic status of the population. Srpsko kolo, a paper of the Serbian Independent Party, indeed recognized a mobilization potential in the atmosphere that appeared on the eve of and during the high treason trial, which “did much for the great task of raising Serbian national consciousness” and “awakened all the Serbian people from their divisions and neglect for their brothers.”Footnote 45 A little later, a similar effect was ascribed to the frequent elections, which “although so hard that they broke all the bones of the poor folk, one can say that they were also good, since they awakened the national consciousness, those who were sleeping the deathly sleep of ignorance, who had no idea what elections were and for what reason they are held.”Footnote 46 The frequent motif of “awakening national consciousness” obviously originated from the frustration of the national activists by what they called “local patriotism,” or the widespread tendency of people to primarily view their identification, interests, and organization of social life through the lens of the narrower or broader local territory upon which they resided, which brought with itself various auto- and hetero-identifications and stereotypes, based not only on ethnicity or nationality, but also on regional affiliation.Footnote 47
The documents produced by the provincial authorities at the time of the high treason trial cannot provide us with a comprehensive picture of the level of “national integration” or the dominant type of the identification of the population, but nevertheless do offer an insight into the slice of time that favored the situational crystallization of societal division according to the principle of nationality. First, the provincial authorities—through arrests of “traitors,” surveillance over potential propagators of “Serbness” (e.g., teachers, public officials, clergy), and the removal of “suspicious” persons from their positions—constituted the “Orthodox” population as a sort of exogenous factor and, in trying to dispute its national affiliation, bolstered it. In doing so, they often employed various forms of denunciation, motivated by political, as well as private, interests, which in turn reacted to, used, and further reproduced the situational sanctioning of belonging to a nationally defined category as the main characteristic of political orientation and loyalty. Reports appeared sporadically, such as one given by the head of Modruš-Rijeka County, claiming that “wherever a population of Orthodox faith lives, there is interest and sympathy for Serbia and such boiling tensions that could, in case of an armed conflict between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, lead to open rebellion.”Footnote 48 There were no uprisings against the state, but resistance toward government representatives in their efforts to take away collective symbols did appear. The most commonly documented form of resistance was toward the removal of “Serbian Church” flags (almost identical to the Serbian state flag) from Orthodox churches, which points to the stronger identification of ecclesiastical with national symbols. However, the most prominent incident regarding a “Serbian flag” displayed at a church in the village of Javoranj in the Zagreb County on 27 October 1909 reveals other dimensions of such events. The peasants there, led by the “local intelligentsia,” demanded to be shown the official order for the removal of the flag by the municipal mayor. Behind this event, there was widespread unhappiness over imposed district and municipal government representatives as well as the poor social and economic state of the region, so this event and similar ones can hardly be labeled as having revolutionary, antistate goals or even as being “nationalist uprisings,” but should be seen primarily as struggles against what was perceived as the arbitrariness of local authorities and an attack against the symbols and rights of the local community.Footnote 49 How much these events resulted from relations in individual local communities is revealed by the fact that, in the same Modruš-Rijeka County where a potential antistate uprising was uncovered in 1909, the head of the county was “received and hailed in a dignified manner” and received requests for the realization of local infrastructural projects in 1911.Footnote 50
The collective symbols caused not only conflicts with government representatives but also divisions between Croats and Serbs in local “mixed” communities. Some historians stress that small provincial towns and market towns became the main battleground of these conflicts, and that villages were only minimally affected.Footnote 51 This is, as a rule, corroborated by documents, newspaper reports, and the social status of most of those who participated in these conflicts. The participants were largely local craftsmen, caterers, priests, teachers, and public officials, who mediated conflicts on the provincial level and among members of the local political elite. In Glina, the place that, according to the documentation, was affected by ethnoconfessional tensions in 1909 and 1910, the Zagreb County delegate somewhat downplayed the importance of these conflicts, ascribing them to irresponsible younger members of the citizenry, and appealed to reason and the “support of all the citizenry, which will not allow itself to be enticed or participate in the destruction of the never before disturbed harmony and mutual care, regardless of differences in religion or nationality.”Footnote 52 He stressed that further tensions could risk the spread of the conflict to the surrounding “innocent” population. Still, the rural population was not innocent in the sense that they were not completely ignorant and apolitical, but on the contrary, they adopted elements of the politicization of religion and ethnicity in its social aspirations, as we have seen in the case of Javoranj. Opposed nationalist political options wanted to use, direct, and define this as a political and symbolic resource. In provincial, confessionally mixed regions of western Croatian counties, these were members of the Pure Party of Right (the so-called frankovci), who were firmly insistent on the doctrinal principle of a unitary “Croatian political nation,” and members of the Serbian Independent Party. Beyond these divisions, which could mobilize a larger number of people in situations of tension, many examples of interconfessional cooperation were also recorded, testifying to the existence of a network of primary social relationships and common cultural and social characteristics that often overcame the drawing of ethnic boundaries on the basis of confessional affiliation.Footnote 53 Moreover, the idea of “national unity” was inherited by the Croat-Serb Coalition as well as some other parties, such as the Croatian People's Peasant Party.Footnote 54 However, within the political field in Croatia and Slavonia, which rested largely on the principles of “cultural compromise” and “social closure” according to ethnic lines, the Croat-Serb Coalition also spread its idea of the equal rights of nationalities by dividing the spheres of its component parties’ influence according to the ethnic criterion. In practice, all nominally oppositional parties divided themselves according to that same principle (excepting Social Democrats, who still had a limited social base for their success), including the Peasant Party, which tried to infiltrate its peasant-class agenda in the Orthodox population, but was sharply attacked by both the Serbian Independent and the Serbian Radical parties as an anti-Serbian party.
After the echoes of the high treason trial died down, the frequent elections became crystallization points for expressing not only party preferences but also ethnic and national identifications and loyalties. The expansion of electoral rights in 1910 (the population allowed to vote grew from 2 percent to around 6 percent) contributed to an intensification of rival Serbian parties, as these parties continued to struggle to realize their vision of securing the rights of Serbs in Croatia and Slavonia. However, from the viewpoint of this article, it is important to note that accounts of the elections, in addition to providing justification for their successes and failures and apologies on the expression of Serbian consciousness, also voiced the disappointment of party protagonists and national activists and specifically their vision of total national mobilization and loyalty toward an imagined national collective had failed to materialize. For instance, an article in Srpsko kolo observed:
If we were more conscious, more united, more selfless … if we looked towards the good of all the people first, and only then towards our own, we wouldn't be facing such evils … We would be stronger than anyone. We would become our own masters. But what can you do when one is more timid than a rabbit, another a sycophant, the third looks only how to gain some profit for himself alone and at the expense of the whole people, the fourth is quarrelsome … and the fifth doesn't want to learn or read? And this is before we even mention our backwardness in work, in saving, and in association.Footnote 55
This and similar accounts reflected an entire series of personal life strategies, which bypassed each other and avoided the imposed ethnic and national categorizations and identities, making their boundaries more flexible and porous in practice. In addition, a great number of those who “did not want to learn and read” perhaps did not even consider it valid nor had the imperative to adopt a politicized conception of ethnicity and abstract imaginarium of Serbian national affiliation, or did it in a way that was inadequate and incomprehensible to the nationalists.
The Balkan Wars represented a new hope for Serbian nationalist activists, in which “one state and one nation were resurrected” and “taught even the dimmest Serb that we are one.”Footnote 56 There is no doubt that the Balkan Wars and the successes of the Kingdom of Serbia were a significant mobilization factor throughout the South Slavic areas. Indeed, they led to new suspicions about the loyalty of the Serbs in the Habsburg monarchy. This time the authorities concentrated on the Orthodox population of southern Hungary and the eastern Croatian-Slavonian counties, which lay on the border with Serbia. Once again, we find the standard repertoire of suspecting, denouncing, and repressing individuals, and we can single out two representative documents. In one of them, the district head of Šid reports on the concern of the Catholics following a rumor that “if the Serbs come here, they would impale all the ‘Šokci’ [i.e. Catholics] and their children on stakes.”Footnote 57 Such rumors allegedly originated during the crises related to Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878 and 1908. In this case, the term “Serbs” was a label for those who came from Serbia, but such rumors could be linked together, and many specific accusations were linked to the “local” Orthodox population. Such accusations were received more seriously by military organs, who demanded constant inquiries, while the organs of civilian government were more restrained. In the other document, the head of Srijem County therefore concluded that “even if a few individuals among the Serbs in Srijem were found to be enemies of the monarchy, they would not be able to rally the broader Serb masses … The [people] won't be moved neither by sympathies towards Serbia nor by reading newspapers. While these things may exist, no effective anti-state activities will come to pass, since the people won't let themselves be led astray in this manner.”Footnote 58
Concluding Remarks
According to an anecdote described by Milan Radeka, in 1914, an older woman asked Archpriest Mojsije Majstorović in Gračac (Lika-Krbava County): “Sir, may God provide for you, is it true that our emperor is at war with our king?,” referring to Francis Joseph and Petar Karađorđević.Footnote 59 Josip Horvat, writing in a memoir about that same year, described how the Yugoslav Nationalist Youth, which dreamed of destroying the Habsburg monarchy after 1908 and especially after the Balkan Wars, came to a sobering conclusion. Namely, “[T]he nationalist movement in Croatia … just like other political movements among the Croats … took hold only among a small group of the intelligentsia … All ideological slogans … passed the people by, not being understood and considered uninteresting.” Horvat concludes that even if they had entered the people's consciousness, they “probably wouldn't have swayed the people, since they did not contain anything that would appeal to their real interests and needs.”Footnote 60 As we see in the case of the woman from Gračac, not all ideological slogans went unnoticed or failed to arouse interest among the people. However, they were experienced, adapted, and prepared in various ways and imposed themselves on and became part of individuals’ views on life and society, influencing their conception of group affiliation and loyalty, but were simultaneously adapted in a situational and relational manner. In this article, I have striven to offer a panoramic view of the phenomena of the creation of ethnic and national categories and identities of Serbs in Croatia and Slavonia during the era of Austro-Hungary, with a focus on the 1908–14 period, when this ethnically defined category of the population within the monarchy was constructed as a national community with politically suspect loyalty. Moving away from the concept of “national integration,” I have attempted to show that the broader population's identification with that ethnic and national category and identity was much more complex in reality. In any case, it is difficult to talk about any sort of straight trajectory of “national integration” that would spread from the social elites toward the broader strata of the population. Indeed, the institutional and political framework of Croatia and Slavonia as part of Austria-Hungary favored the creation of “cultural compromise” and “social closure” according to ethnoconfessional principles. Thus, even if it can be argued that the ethnic borders of the Serbian community on the eve of World War I indeed became more prominent, important, and popular than before, it still does not mean that there was no interest-related, situational, or relational variability regarding the phenomenon of ethnic and national identification even among the political elite and upper middle class, let alone the broader population. To make a more nuanced and sophisticated analysis, more research in the vein of Wimmer's research model, for example, is necessary. This research should concentrate on the individual strategic variability of boundary making within the range of possibilities given by sources, but also recognize that these individual strategies are being restrained in different ways, including institutional settings providing legitimacy to certain categorical cleavages, the different social power of imposing these categorical cleavages, and the interactional dynamic of forming a boundary.Footnote 61 From this angle, the claim of this supposed ethnic community's homogenous loyalty to the national Serbian community in the sense of “territorial nationality” and especially the claim of its mass “disloyalty” toward the Habsburg monarchy should be studied in more detail.
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On 12 January 1909, the State Attorney for the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia issued an indictment for the crime of high treason against fifty-three men, the majority of whom were members of the Serbian Independent Party.Footnote 1 They were charged with propagating and pursuing, in collaboration with members of political circles in the Kingdom of Serbia, the unification of the provinces of Croatia and Slavonia, Dalmatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina with the Kingdom of Serbia, and thus the creation of “Greater Serbia.” The indictment claimed that the accused had misled members of the “Greek-Eastern” religion, telling them that they were of Serbian nationality and identical to the people of the Kingdom of Serbia. They performed this by organizing and bringing together—economically, politically, and nationally—everything that was called “Serbian,” by negating the “Croatian” name, and by generally boycotting everything that was not “Serbian.” Furthermore, the indictment claimed that, until recently, among the broader strata of the “Greek-Eastern” population, there had been no awareness of the existence of a Serbian name and no identification of the “Greek-Eastern” denomination in Croatia and Slavonia with Serbian nationality in any symbolic way. The reasoning was that this population was of varied descent (“Vlacho-Romanian,” “Greek” or “autochthonous,” while only a small part was “Serbian”) and had therefore been assimilated with the “domestic autochthonous element.”Footnote 2
Consequently, near the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, contrary to the widely accepted institutional and public discourse about ethnic or national groups and nationalization of the masses in the Habsburg monarchy, we encounter an indictment, issued by the highest judicial body, that negates the existence of any mass identification of the population with the Serbian nationality and even negates the existence of a widespread Serbian ethnicity, considering it all a treasonous import of those political circles that supported the rival Kingdom of Serbia and its geopolitical interests. All this was occurring in the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia, where we can find the existence of political parties bearing the Serbian name since the end of the period of Habsburg neoabsolutism, numerous cultural and economic associations with the Serbian name, and the Serbian Orthodox Church organization, which has been gathering its congregation under its national name since 1868.
In this article, I use the high treason indictment as a starting point for reflecting on the important issue of Serbian nationality in the period preceding World War I and analyze this issue by using Croatia and Slavonia as a case study. I argue that the ethnic boundaries of the “Serbian community” in Croatia and Slavonia in this period became more salient, important, and had a broader population basis than before, but at the same time, this neither prevented contestations over the meanings and political implications of those boundaries, nor abolished the space for local negotiations over the boundary's significance in everyday situations.
When putting forward such a thesis, one might ask how important the categories of “Orthodox” and “Serbs” were in the political arena of the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia, and how important they were for the population assigned to these categories. Was the national category of “Serbness” really imported from abroad and used for antimonarchial political aims, or was its political salience and claims of cultural distinctiveness rather the product of the dualist Austro-Hungarian state and social system? Had the population in fact followed rather different types of everyday identifications and group loyalties, ones that were not primarily attached along ethnic and national lines? Such complex questions, which involve analyzing the phenomena of ethnic and national categorization and identification as well as the questions regarding the creation of the institutional framework of their organization and prominence in everyday life, are difficult to answer in one article. Therefore, I will attempt only to sketch possible paths toward finding answers to the raised questions and prove my thesis by selecting relevant examples and interpreting them in accordance with new studies on nationalism and ethnicity
Events like the high treason trial were a political process and sought to impose the ideology of “Croatian state rights,” according to which the “Croatian political nation” exclusively inhabited Croatia and Slavonia.Footnote 3 Taking place during the Bosnian Annexation Crisis, the high treason trial was the result of the intersection of the interests of the ruling circles in Vienna, the Hungarian government, and a combination of local political actors from all political levels, from the highest circles of the monarchy to provincial political interests.Footnote 4 The indictment reflected the ongoing process of affiliation of members of the “Greek-Eastern” population category with Serbian ethnicity and the Serbian nation. In doing so, it stated concerns and conceptualized the phenomenon that Rogers Brubaker has termed “territorial nationality,” which “involves claims for … symbolic recognition as a state-bearing nation rather than as a mere ‘minority,’ for territorial autonomy or even full independence, and sometimes for rapprochement with a neighboring ‘kin’ or ‘homeland’ state” as well as for various cultural rights.Footnote 5 Thus the population categorized as “Orthodox” according to the religious criterion became part of the broader anti-Serbian discourse, which culminated in the outbreak of World War I, when it was labeled by the highest authorities in the monarchy, principally military circles, as a collective threat to the monarchy's existence.Footnote 6 The 1909 indictment contained bourgeois discourse that promulgated the topoi of the “intelligentsia” as a carrier of group identities and a propagator of (in this case treasonous) ideas, on the one hand, and of “uneducated masses,” vulnerable to manipulation, or “maddening,” on the other. Consequently, the claims from 1914 about the “Serbian” population as a potentially massively disloyal element would imply the exceptional success of Serbian propaganda. Such implications also stemmed from the changes in the political field in Croatia and Slavonia at the turn of the century, which began to emphasize more strongly the importance of everyday social and economic issues of the population, which in turn influenced conceptions of how this type of politics should be led, basic political messages and tasks, and the recipients that needed to be reached. As I argue, the linking of these political imperatives to the promotion of the ethnic and national identifications and loyalties among the populace was incentivized by the institutional and political system of Austria-Hungary.
Serbian nationalist activists vehemently refuted charges contained in the indictment. In doing so, they were paradoxically and simultaneously confirming those claims to a certain extent by acknowledging their own work in awakening the “Serbian consciousness.” For example, in a book published in defense of the defendants at the trial, Radoslav Grujić argued the long existence of the Serbian people as a well-defined and organized entity, who had settled in Hungary and Croatia and Slavonia in compact groups, characterized by their own language, religion, and specific church organization.Footnote 7 He also argued that, from these determinants, the Serbian people had grounds for claiming their cultural and political rights on the territory they inhabited.Footnote 8 The principal defendant at the high treason trial, Adam Pribićević, made the same assumptions of the long existence of Serbian ethnicity. By contrast, he also acknowledged that Serbian consciousness had just started to awaken, and that Serbian nationalist activists were spreading the Serbian name and symbols among the people who, as the activists believed, primordially belonged to the Serbian ethnicity. Pribićević considered this to be the justified, and not treacherous, aim of Serbian political parties, just like the aim of Croatian political parties was to awaken Croatian consciousness.Footnote 9 So, the first defendant at the high treason trial, a man who without doubt supported the nationalist agenda of the reification of ethnic groups as natural and essential forms of self-consciousness and as pivotal social forms, admitted that the consciousness of the ethnic and national community, of which he was a zealous protagonist, was still in the process of spreading.
The notion of the recent ethnicization and nationalization of Orthodox population, as claimed by the indictment and partly acknowledged by Serbian national activists, somewhat contradicts accounts made by the political protagonists of the 1860s. For example, the declarations of the Croatian Parliament from 1861 and 1867 acknowledged the existence of the Serbian people in the Triune Kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia, albeit with some hesitation about deciding whether they were “identical” or “of equal rights” to the Croatian people.Footnote 10 Furthermore, the statements made in 1863 in the then most important newspaper Pozor (Attention) claimed that a majority of the Serbs had until recently referred to themselves using provincial names, but that the people of Orthodox faith had now awakened and consequently referred to themselves using their national Serbian name.Footnote 11 One of Hungary's most prominent Serbian politicians, Mihailo Polit-Desančić, came to a similar conclusion in the late 1870s, when he declared in the Hungarian Parliament that the Serbs and Croats were one people because they have the same language, but that the Serbs have managed to preserve their nationality better.Footnote 12 Even Mirjana Gross, who conducted a detailed historiographic analysis of the ambiguous relations between politicians in the 1860s and 1870s who strove to identify and define the group whom they politically represented and in whose name they spoke, concluded that the “flow of Croatian national integration was slower than the Serbian one.”Footnote 13 Such historiographic assessments sometimes ignored the fact that the mentioned early successes of “national integrations” were often merely an intellectual construction of a relatively thin layer of highly educated citizenry, who took up the role of the political elite and signifiers of the societal dimension of the group they represented in a postfeudal society.
The now already classic concept of researching “Croatian” and “Serbian” “national integration,” with its functionalistic, deterministic, and teleological admixtures, has become analytically too rigid. More recent historiography strives to deconstruct and make less deterministic our understanding of the process of the nationalization of the population or the politicization of ethnicity. It also aims to go beyond covering the entire social space of the second half of the nineteenth century with clear and distinctive ethnic and national identities.Footnote 14 Moreover, the concept of “national integration” carries with it the problem of falling into the trap of ethnicism, often repeating at its heart the very discourse used by the nationalists, who should be the object of research and analysis. As Jeremy King has argued, “[E]thnicism is a vague, largely implicit framework that holds the nations of East Central Europe to have sprung primarily from a specific set of mass, mutually exclusive ethnic groups defined by inherited cultural and linguistic patterns.”Footnote 15 He also noticed that ethnicists’ approaches shed much light on the nationalization of political structures but that they explain the development of national consciousness (the nationalization of individuals) in a systematically flawed fashion.Footnote 16 This echoes Brubaker's famous call to be aware of the reification of ethnic groups, or “the tendency to represent the social and cultural world as a multi-chrome mosaic of monochrome ethnic, racial, or cultural blocs.”Footnote 17 However, Andreas Wimmer argues that successful political mobilization along ethnic lines neither encompasses the whole ethnic group, nor should it be simply ascribed to manipulation by political elites. “Radical constructivism,” as he calls it, is often obsessed with exorcising essentialism, reification, and objectification from the study of ethnicity, though in some contexts “ethnicity has become a master principle of social organization that structures individuals’ life chances systematically.”Footnote 18 Moreover, in his more recent work, Brubaker, after a “microanalytic turn,” returned to “meso- and macroanalytic levels of analysis,” advocating, among other things, a more sophisticated analysis of the “single modernity” perspective, with the goal of better understanding specific manifestations of nationalism and politicized ethnicity “as basic principles of vision and division of the social world, as fundamental ways of identifying self and other, and as elementary templates of making claims.”Footnote 19
Contextualizing Serbian “Grounds for Difference” in the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia
Historiography of the late Habsburg monarchy, which has over the last decades begun to point to the situational, relational, and contingent nature of groups, and therefore also ethnic and national identities and identifications, has for the most part focused on multilingual areas. However, the area covered in this article was monolingual but biconfessional, in which the confessional difference of Catholicism and Orthodoxy transformed itself into the basis for ethnic categorization, construction, and presentation of distinctive ethnic and national identities.Footnote 20 This is important to highlight because it seems that eminent researchers who deconstruct the ethnicist approach to analyzing multilingual areas presuppose a stronger influence of religion on the phenomena of identification and creating group identities. For instance, Johannes Feichtinger and Gary Cohen accept Pieter Judson's belief that “national loyalties were never as deeply rooted as were other forms of self-identification (e.g., religion).”Footnote 21 Judson notes that in Galicia and Bukovina, for example, “religious differences created more of a sense of distinct local cultures,” though he stresses that even these were often overcome by common cultural characteristics.Footnote 22 He also claims that “religious diversity, for example, was often a far better predictor of local perceptions of cultural difference in rural Austria than was linguistic diversity.”Footnote 23
Does this suggest that the perception of cultural difference based on confessional difference had a stronger influence on predetermining the ethnic categories, identities, and therefore the identification of the population on the area of Croatia and Slavonia? We can begin a more nuanced consideration of this matter than in standard depictions and analyses if we attempt to apply criteria of analysis of the construction of group identity categories, identities, and identifications that are used for multilingual areas. Therefore, in the vein of geographer George W. White, I postulate that, in Croatia and Slavonia (as well as in the broader South Slavic area with a multiconfessional population), religion per se did not determine ethnic categories but was used as the main social characteristic of their distinction.Footnote 24
This process of distinguishing a population according to ethnic and national markers in the area of Croatia and Slavonia followed the general trends in the Habsburg monarchy. King writes that, with the emergence of the modern doctrine of popular sovereignty in the Habsburg monarchy, “[i]n this clash among non-Habsburg populist principles of political legitimacy,” the principle of “nationhood had triumphed in East Central Europe, generically if not specifically” narrowing choices for individuals.Footnote 25 In the case of the Serbian nationalist populist movement, it was precisely confession—that is its ecclesiastical organization—which beginning from the late seventeenth century maintained its jurisdiction over the Orthodox population on the basis of imperial privileges, that served as the main repository for arguments on the cultural identity and criteria of belonging to the Serbian ethnic community in Hungary and Croatia and Slavonia. The key incentive to this was given by the Hungarian Parliament in 1868, when it recognized Serbian national-ecclesiastical autonomy, which reached beyond the boundaries of Hungary and Croatia and Slavonia and had the right to manage the religious, spiritual, and educational affairs of a population that it characterized as “Serbian Orthodox.” As Nicholas Miller has pointed out, concerning the second half of the nineteenth century, “[E]ventually, as identity became less a function of status and faith and more of ethnicity and culture, this autonomous cultural existence would provide the basis for a thriving Serbian community, and even its claims for political self-determination.”Footnote 26
Autonomy served as the basis for this, but the constitutional framework of the Hungarian half of the monarchy also facilitated it. Even in the Austrian half of the monarchy, constitutional basis rested on, among other things, the principles of equality between nations (in the sense of citizens of various nationalities with equal rights, and not as collective entities). In practice, as time went by, the process of “ethnicization” became more and more prominent, and it was precisely the belonging to an ethnically defined collective that became increasingly important in organizing one's life.Footnote 27 Hungary, however, was proclaimed a unitary national state of the “Hungarian political nation” in 1867, albeit with the recognition of the existence of nationalities in the sense of minority groups. Although minority groups did not enjoy the full recognition of their rights, the state did recognize individual's right to express his nationality. As Judson summarizes, the Hungarian political class viewed the Compromise with the emperor as confirmation of the historical independence of Hungary from the other Habsburg lands, while the Compromise with Croatia confirmed the latter's historical constitutional relationship with Hungary: “In both cases, however, the political demands of modern nationhood soon overwhelmed traditional arguments about national sovereignty. Constitutional questions became increasingly bound up with national cultural concerns, which were increasingly expressed in ethnic terms to make them more persuasive.”Footnote 28 This is why constitutional matters, related to the questions of nationality and its significance, had precedence over other social and economic questions and in practice produced a policy of Hungarization, ethnically defined and alienating for many segments of society. The limited electoral rights in the Kingdom of Hungary also influenced this orientation of the political scene.Footnote 29
Because it was a “minority partner” in the Kingdom of Hungary, the political class of Croatia and Slavonia had less power and thus had a lower level of confidence but a greater sense of victimization. The problem of the constitutional status of Croatia and Slavonia in Hungary and the monarchy, and the possibilities and ways of its resolution in a more favorable manner, constantly framed political discussions in Croatia and Slavonia. A favorable resolution to this question for Croatia and Slavonia—around which several political orientations, tactics, and practices were based—was seen as a necessary prerequisite to solve the problem of the province's stagnant economic and social development. Within the limited political, social, and economic capabilities of Croatian self-government and the relatively high level of dependence on the Hungarian center, the estate-based concept of Croatia and Slavonia as the “Croatian political nation,” recognized by the Compromise in circumstances of the general “culturization” of politics in the monarchy, caused political cleavages around the question of who exactly belongs to the “political nation” and which way they need to be defined and qualified.Footnote 30 These cleavages, specifically in the case of the building and presentation of a distinctive Serbian national community, were rooted in the Hungarian Constitution and the notion that national-ecclesiastical autonomy acted as an institutionally and culturally cohesive factor and consequently influenced the “emergence of a society that starts dividing itself along confessional lines and producing parallel political claims; these contrasting interpretations of how to define the Croatian political body are at the center of the conflict between Croats and Serbs.”Footnote 31
However, the question of building distinctive ethnic categories and identities in the Croatian-Serbian case is made even more complex by the fact that the protagonists—who presented themselves and were institutionally recognized as representatives of their ethnic communities (through elections, participation in government organs on various levels, and participation in civil organizations built on the ethnic principle)—had phases of not only conflict but also cooperation. Here we can differentiate between the space of practical political, social, and cultural activity and the space of ideological production of meaning, which was supposed to explain, direct, and interpret this practical activity. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the former passed through several general phases that were characterized by either conflict or cooperation between Croatian- and Serbian-defined political actors, in which the Hungarian government—always a divisive factor—also played an important role. A whole complex of specific relations was present within these general phases, as it was among the representatives of the Croatian and Serbian national community, which were dependent on a series of structural (social, economic, regional), but also situational, contingent factors. In accordance with this, sometimes influencing practical social activity, and sometimes reacting to it, the ideological construction of reality changed and adapted itself.
However, following the typology of ideologies offered by Siniša Malešević, I believe it is possible to speak of the existence of a normative and operational ideology in the case of Croatian and Serbian nationalist protagonists.Footnote 32 The first was inclusive and under the influence of the dominant understanding that ethnicity and nationality are defined through language. Owing to this then universally accepted intellectual criterion, which was adopted by the educated citizenry, a fundamental ethnic dividing line between Croats and Serbs could not be drawn, which is why different forms of defining and naming one's belonging to a Croatian or Serbian national community as well as different visions of the relationship between the two developed. However, the formulation of operational ideology depended on reality, in other words on the possibility of the actor creating or using it to realize their interests through characteristics that could be substantiated institutionally or culturally and historically. And it is here that, in our case, we once again find confession as a decisive factor in creating ethnic categories in the Croat-Serb case.
To reconceptualize the mentioned problems and offer a potential theoretical-interpretative frame for understanding their genesis and development, I will make use of the work of Andreas Wimmer. He considers the concepts of “cultural compromise” and “social closure” to be the most important characteristics of modern societies. In Nationalist Exclusion and Ethnic Conflict: Shadows of Modernity, Wimmer postulates: “A cultural compromise emerges when the actors sharing a communicative space can agree that certain values are valuable and that certain modes of classifying the social world make sense.”Footnote 33 This entails a discussion about meaning, in which individuals of various economic, social, and cultural positions can begin considering a certain vision of the social world as making sense. It is also significant that this consensus does not take place completely in the world of rational decisions, but also depends on the already established and internalized modes of meaning. This is why cultural compromise exists in manifold interpretations and variations and is malleable, depending on power relations. In addition, “Those that have taken part in the negotiation process stabilise the achieved compromise by closing their ranks, controlling access to the group and marking its boundaries with diacritic elements…The realization of these principles through institutions of boundary maintenance is…a process of social closure. It can lead to the establishment of ethnic groups, nations, social classes, estates, village communities and so on.”Footnote 34 In my case study, it is important to keep in mind Wimmer's thesis that the process of nationalization “depends on a successful compromise between the new state elites and the various component parts of society: an exchange of loyalty for participation, equal treatment before the law and the symbolic capital associated with the rise from plebs to nation. If the state's elite are unable to provide these collective goods to the whole population of the national state, similar processes of social closure to develop on a subnational, ethnic basis.”Footnote 35
What follows from this is that “[t]he polity will then be fragmented into ethnic groups perceiving themselves as communities of shared destiny and political solidarity … [E]thnic ties become the channels through which the new elites distribute the collective goods of the modern state in order to legitimize their rule … In this way, the diffusion and rooting of a national identity is undermined, and ethnic groups are transformed into communities of political interest.”Footnote 36 In the context of the dominant Hungarian ruling political class's aspiration toward the “Hungarization” of the Hungarian state, as well as the weakness and compromised nature of Croatia and Slavonia's self-government and its inability to offer a coherent, believable, and sustainable vision of the “Croatian political nation,” theoretical conceptualizations such as Wimmer's can help us to comprehend the genesis of ethnic categories and identities as well as the politicization of ethnicity as the basic principle of dividing the social world and a model for formulating and implementing political and social demands.
Ethnic and National Categories, Identities, and Their Recipients
Wimmer believes that political mobilization never encompasses an entire ethnic group (or, I would add, all those individuals who, according to the legitimized vision and division of the social world, should belong to a certain ethnic group), but that successful mobilization needs support “from below.”Footnote 37 Thus, the important issue of the ethnicization of individuals, their reception of ethnic categorization, and their adherence to ethnic groups remains. In this respect, Stefano Petrungaro's groundbreaking historical work on the territory of Croatia and Slavonia are especially significant with respect to the category of the “Orthodox” population. By and large, the population of this category inhabited the peculiar territory of Military Border, which had been cut off from the ongoing political and social processes until 1881, when it was integrated into the province of Croatia and Slavonia. Petrungaro argues that, “[O]ver the centuries, a collective sense of identification was formed, connected to the territory and the social role of its inhabitants. With the dissolution of Military Border, this hetero- and auto-identification became anachronous and had to cede its power to the new identities that were slowly situating themselves in the politics and the imaginarium of that time. In national terms, the Croatian and Serbian national identities were offered ‘from above.’”Footnote 38 By studying social protests in a Croatian rural setting, Petrungaro notices that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, “peasants’ awareness of the cultural, institutional and political landscape in Croatia was increased … symbolic targets were identified more clearly than in the past, and consensual meaning was attributed to the symbols involved.”Footnote 39 In addition, “[A]rticulated collective rituals took place, which merged social, cultural, national and religious issues.”Footnote 40 This was also an answer to a new political style, which started to pay attention to the social and economic issues of rural areas, linking them with new types of identifications and loyalties.Footnote 41 However, Petrungaro warns that “peasants were not simply passive targets of the new policies. On one hand, they delivered an ‘active’ reaction to the socio-political novelties, providing their own interpretation of political symbols, while on the other hand, they were sometimes unable to clearly recognize and deal with the modern political imagery, leaving room for identificational uncertainties and ambiguities.”Footnote 42
This new type of politics at the turn of the century sought to abandon the almost exclusive focus on endless discussions about the constitutional position of Croatia and the defining of Croatian-Serbian relations and instead to devote itself to practical work among the broader social strata. This entailed the establishment and strengthening of a series of economic and cultural institutions, which had the goal of influencing the poor socioeconomic status of the predominantly rural and agrarian population and the more successful adaptation to a modern, individualized socioeconomic order. However, inability, and sometimes reluctance, of the provincial governments to offer access to “collective goods” (i.e., socioeconomic infrastructure, political representation) to a large part of the population, incentivized the appearance of institutions that defined their potential clientele on an ethnic basis. Miller, thus, stresses that “for the most part, and especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, these institutions were viewed by their founders as ammunition in a battle to maintain the nation,” and, regarding the issue of Serbian institutions, concludes: “Together, the banking institutions, publishing companies, and party organizations served to segregate Serbs from their neighbors and inculcate an insular sense of community. They also promoted often vicious political confrontations within the Serbian community, confrontations that were partly ideological and partly practical.”Footnote 43 The Serbian political parties in the beginning of the twentieth century disagreed over issues of cooperation with Croatian parties, how to resolve the position of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia (not only the province of Croatia and Slavonia, but also the Triune Kingdom, an entity that would also encompass Dalmatia), and most importantly, the position and rights of Serbs within their borders. What they had in common, and what is most important for the purposes of this article, was that they were fighting for the support of the same population, ethnically defined as “Serbian-Orthodox,” linking it to the broader Serbian national community. Furthermore, owing in large part to the pressures manifested in the high treason trial after 1908, the Serbian Independent Party—which unlike the rival Radical Party was normatively based on the principles of the “national unity” of Croats and Serbs and advocated a more modern conception of individual civil rights and political participation—began to move toward a policy of “collective defense.”Footnote 44
The specific confluence of events that took place from 1908 until 1914 worked in favor of the basic intention of Serbian national activists to spread Serbian national consciousness, as Adam Pribićević declared. The high treason trial; the repeated dissolutions of the Parliament and the conducting of new elections; the introduction of a state of constitutional emergency and the establishment of the Commissariat in 1912–13; the abolition of Serbian national-ecclesiastical autonomy in 1912; and the Balkan Wars were all situational factors in which the threat and contestation of Serbian ethnicity and nationality in the monarchy could be discerned, and these problems were linked to the unfavorable socioeconomic status of the population. Srpsko kolo, a paper of the Serbian Independent Party, indeed recognized a mobilization potential in the atmosphere that appeared on the eve of and during the high treason trial, which “did much for the great task of raising Serbian national consciousness” and “awakened all the Serbian people from their divisions and neglect for their brothers.”Footnote 45 A little later, a similar effect was ascribed to the frequent elections, which “although so hard that they broke all the bones of the poor folk, one can say that they were also good, since they awakened the national consciousness, those who were sleeping the deathly sleep of ignorance, who had no idea what elections were and for what reason they are held.”Footnote 46 The frequent motif of “awakening national consciousness” obviously originated from the frustration of the national activists by what they called “local patriotism,” or the widespread tendency of people to primarily view their identification, interests, and organization of social life through the lens of the narrower or broader local territory upon which they resided, which brought with itself various auto- and hetero-identifications and stereotypes, based not only on ethnicity or nationality, but also on regional affiliation.Footnote 47
The documents produced by the provincial authorities at the time of the high treason trial cannot provide us with a comprehensive picture of the level of “national integration” or the dominant type of the identification of the population, but nevertheless do offer an insight into the slice of time that favored the situational crystallization of societal division according to the principle of nationality. First, the provincial authorities—through arrests of “traitors,” surveillance over potential propagators of “Serbness” (e.g., teachers, public officials, clergy), and the removal of “suspicious” persons from their positions—constituted the “Orthodox” population as a sort of exogenous factor and, in trying to dispute its national affiliation, bolstered it. In doing so, they often employed various forms of denunciation, motivated by political, as well as private, interests, which in turn reacted to, used, and further reproduced the situational sanctioning of belonging to a nationally defined category as the main characteristic of political orientation and loyalty. Reports appeared sporadically, such as one given by the head of Modruš-Rijeka County, claiming that “wherever a population of Orthodox faith lives, there is interest and sympathy for Serbia and such boiling tensions that could, in case of an armed conflict between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, lead to open rebellion.”Footnote 48 There were no uprisings against the state, but resistance toward government representatives in their efforts to take away collective symbols did appear. The most commonly documented form of resistance was toward the removal of “Serbian Church” flags (almost identical to the Serbian state flag) from Orthodox churches, which points to the stronger identification of ecclesiastical with national symbols. However, the most prominent incident regarding a “Serbian flag” displayed at a church in the village of Javoranj in the Zagreb County on 27 October 1909 reveals other dimensions of such events. The peasants there, led by the “local intelligentsia,” demanded to be shown the official order for the removal of the flag by the municipal mayor. Behind this event, there was widespread unhappiness over imposed district and municipal government representatives as well as the poor social and economic state of the region, so this event and similar ones can hardly be labeled as having revolutionary, antistate goals or even as being “nationalist uprisings,” but should be seen primarily as struggles against what was perceived as the arbitrariness of local authorities and an attack against the symbols and rights of the local community.Footnote 49 How much these events resulted from relations in individual local communities is revealed by the fact that, in the same Modruš-Rijeka County where a potential antistate uprising was uncovered in 1909, the head of the county was “received and hailed in a dignified manner” and received requests for the realization of local infrastructural projects in 1911.Footnote 50
The collective symbols caused not only conflicts with government representatives but also divisions between Croats and Serbs in local “mixed” communities. Some historians stress that small provincial towns and market towns became the main battleground of these conflicts, and that villages were only minimally affected.Footnote 51 This is, as a rule, corroborated by documents, newspaper reports, and the social status of most of those who participated in these conflicts. The participants were largely local craftsmen, caterers, priests, teachers, and public officials, who mediated conflicts on the provincial level and among members of the local political elite. In Glina, the place that, according to the documentation, was affected by ethnoconfessional tensions in 1909 and 1910, the Zagreb County delegate somewhat downplayed the importance of these conflicts, ascribing them to irresponsible younger members of the citizenry, and appealed to reason and the “support of all the citizenry, which will not allow itself to be enticed or participate in the destruction of the never before disturbed harmony and mutual care, regardless of differences in religion or nationality.”Footnote 52 He stressed that further tensions could risk the spread of the conflict to the surrounding “innocent” population. Still, the rural population was not innocent in the sense that they were not completely ignorant and apolitical, but on the contrary, they adopted elements of the politicization of religion and ethnicity in its social aspirations, as we have seen in the case of Javoranj. Opposed nationalist political options wanted to use, direct, and define this as a political and symbolic resource. In provincial, confessionally mixed regions of western Croatian counties, these were members of the Pure Party of Right (the so-called frankovci), who were firmly insistent on the doctrinal principle of a unitary “Croatian political nation,” and members of the Serbian Independent Party. Beyond these divisions, which could mobilize a larger number of people in situations of tension, many examples of interconfessional cooperation were also recorded, testifying to the existence of a network of primary social relationships and common cultural and social characteristics that often overcame the drawing of ethnic boundaries on the basis of confessional affiliation.Footnote 53 Moreover, the idea of “national unity” was inherited by the Croat-Serb Coalition as well as some other parties, such as the Croatian People's Peasant Party.Footnote 54 However, within the political field in Croatia and Slavonia, which rested largely on the principles of “cultural compromise” and “social closure” according to ethnic lines, the Croat-Serb Coalition also spread its idea of the equal rights of nationalities by dividing the spheres of its component parties’ influence according to the ethnic criterion. In practice, all nominally oppositional parties divided themselves according to that same principle (excepting Social Democrats, who still had a limited social base for their success), including the Peasant Party, which tried to infiltrate its peasant-class agenda in the Orthodox population, but was sharply attacked by both the Serbian Independent and the Serbian Radical parties as an anti-Serbian party.
After the echoes of the high treason trial died down, the frequent elections became crystallization points for expressing not only party preferences but also ethnic and national identifications and loyalties. The expansion of electoral rights in 1910 (the population allowed to vote grew from 2 percent to around 6 percent) contributed to an intensification of rival Serbian parties, as these parties continued to struggle to realize their vision of securing the rights of Serbs in Croatia and Slavonia. However, from the viewpoint of this article, it is important to note that accounts of the elections, in addition to providing justification for their successes and failures and apologies on the expression of Serbian consciousness, also voiced the disappointment of party protagonists and national activists and specifically their vision of total national mobilization and loyalty toward an imagined national collective had failed to materialize. For instance, an article in Srpsko kolo observed:
If we were more conscious, more united, more selfless … if we looked towards the good of all the people first, and only then towards our own, we wouldn't be facing such evils … We would be stronger than anyone. We would become our own masters. But what can you do when one is more timid than a rabbit, another a sycophant, the third looks only how to gain some profit for himself alone and at the expense of the whole people, the fourth is quarrelsome … and the fifth doesn't want to learn or read? And this is before we even mention our backwardness in work, in saving, and in association.Footnote 55
This and similar accounts reflected an entire series of personal life strategies, which bypassed each other and avoided the imposed ethnic and national categorizations and identities, making their boundaries more flexible and porous in practice. In addition, a great number of those who “did not want to learn and read” perhaps did not even consider it valid nor had the imperative to adopt a politicized conception of ethnicity and abstract imaginarium of Serbian national affiliation, or did it in a way that was inadequate and incomprehensible to the nationalists.
The Balkan Wars represented a new hope for Serbian nationalist activists, in which “one state and one nation were resurrected” and “taught even the dimmest Serb that we are one.”Footnote 56 There is no doubt that the Balkan Wars and the successes of the Kingdom of Serbia were a significant mobilization factor throughout the South Slavic areas. Indeed, they led to new suspicions about the loyalty of the Serbs in the Habsburg monarchy. This time the authorities concentrated on the Orthodox population of southern Hungary and the eastern Croatian-Slavonian counties, which lay on the border with Serbia. Once again, we find the standard repertoire of suspecting, denouncing, and repressing individuals, and we can single out two representative documents. In one of them, the district head of Šid reports on the concern of the Catholics following a rumor that “if the Serbs come here, they would impale all the ‘Šokci’ [i.e. Catholics] and their children on stakes.”Footnote 57 Such rumors allegedly originated during the crises related to Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878 and 1908. In this case, the term “Serbs” was a label for those who came from Serbia, but such rumors could be linked together, and many specific accusations were linked to the “local” Orthodox population. Such accusations were received more seriously by military organs, who demanded constant inquiries, while the organs of civilian government were more restrained. In the other document, the head of Srijem County therefore concluded that “even if a few individuals among the Serbs in Srijem were found to be enemies of the monarchy, they would not be able to rally the broader Serb masses … The [people] won't be moved neither by sympathies towards Serbia nor by reading newspapers. While these things may exist, no effective anti-state activities will come to pass, since the people won't let themselves be led astray in this manner.”Footnote 58
Concluding Remarks
According to an anecdote described by Milan Radeka, in 1914, an older woman asked Archpriest Mojsije Majstorović in Gračac (Lika-Krbava County): “Sir, may God provide for you, is it true that our emperor is at war with our king?,” referring to Francis Joseph and Petar Karađorđević.Footnote 59 Josip Horvat, writing in a memoir about that same year, described how the Yugoslav Nationalist Youth, which dreamed of destroying the Habsburg monarchy after 1908 and especially after the Balkan Wars, came to a sobering conclusion. Namely, “[T]he nationalist movement in Croatia … just like other political movements among the Croats … took hold only among a small group of the intelligentsia … All ideological slogans … passed the people by, not being understood and considered uninteresting.” Horvat concludes that even if they had entered the people's consciousness, they “probably wouldn't have swayed the people, since they did not contain anything that would appeal to their real interests and needs.”Footnote 60 As we see in the case of the woman from Gračac, not all ideological slogans went unnoticed or failed to arouse interest among the people. However, they were experienced, adapted, and prepared in various ways and imposed themselves on and became part of individuals’ views on life and society, influencing their conception of group affiliation and loyalty, but were simultaneously adapted in a situational and relational manner. In this article, I have striven to offer a panoramic view of the phenomena of the creation of ethnic and national categories and identities of Serbs in Croatia and Slavonia during the era of Austro-Hungary, with a focus on the 1908–14 period, when this ethnically defined category of the population within the monarchy was constructed as a national community with politically suspect loyalty. Moving away from the concept of “national integration,” I have attempted to show that the broader population's identification with that ethnic and national category and identity was much more complex in reality. In any case, it is difficult to talk about any sort of straight trajectory of “national integration” that would spread from the social elites toward the broader strata of the population. Indeed, the institutional and political framework of Croatia and Slavonia as part of Austria-Hungary favored the creation of “cultural compromise” and “social closure” according to ethnoconfessional principles. Thus, even if it can be argued that the ethnic borders of the Serbian community on the eve of World War I indeed became more prominent, important, and popular than before, it still does not mean that there was no interest-related, situational, or relational variability regarding the phenomenon of ethnic and national identification even among the political elite and upper middle class, let alone the broader population. To make a more nuanced and sophisticated analysis, more research in the vein of Wimmer's research model, for example, is necessary. This research should concentrate on the individual strategic variability of boundary making within the range of possibilities given by sources, but also recognize that these individual strategies are being restrained in different ways, including institutional settings providing legitimacy to certain categorical cleavages, the different social power of imposing these categorical cleavages, and the interactional dynamic of forming a boundary.Footnote 61 From this angle, the claim of this supposed ethnic community's homogenous loyalty to the national Serbian community in the sense of “territorial nationality” and especially the claim of its mass “disloyalty” toward the Habsburg monarchy should be studied in more detail.