Workers' Self-Management and the Politics of Ethnic Nationalism in Yugoslavia

In: Nationalities papers: the journal of nationalism and ethnicity, Band 5, Heft 1, S. 1-21

Abstract

Yugoslav nationalism like other European nationalist movements is largely the product of the nineteenth century. The peoples of Yugoslavia were separated by cultural differences which seemed minor when compared with those of their occupiers, the Germanic Hapsburgs and the Ottoman Turks. The dream uniting the South Slavic peoples was the achievement of liberation from both foreign overlords. The conditions of the Balkans in the nineteenth century constituted the fertile ground in which the Yugoslav ideal flourished. The Yugoslav ideal became a uniting ideology which enabled all the Slavic peoples to play their role in the quest for liberation.