Serbian nationalism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The factual accuracy of this article or section is disputed.
Please see the relevant discussion on the talk page.

This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims.
Please help Wikipedia by adding references. See the talk page for details.

Serbian nationalism is an old phenomenon between the Slavic, generally Orthodox, Shtokavian-speaking peoples of the Balkans — denominated Serbs, beginning to appear in the Middle Ages during the long process of fall of Byzantine Empire, most specifically at the Battle of Kosovo Polje of 1389 that ceded most of the old Serbian Kingdom to the Ottoman Empire.

The renaissance of Serbian nationalism after three centuries of Ottoman control of the Balkans came at the time of the romantic-nationalist Revolutions of 1848 in Western Europe and the 19th-century expansion and rise of a great Slavic Orthodox power, the Russian Empire, which has designed itself as a protector (and later liberator) of Orthodox Christian peoples (among Serbs, Greeks, Romanians, Bulgarians, Slavic Macedonians) on Ottoman lands.

Narodna Odbrana logo

At the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, many Serbian nationalist movements like Narodna Odbrana, Black Hand and Young Bosnia has a character more based on concepts of anti-imperialism (specially against Austro-Hungarian Empire) and secular Pan-Slavism than any religious identity, having mixed Orthodox and Muslims, like Muhamed Mehmedbašić, in their membership.^[1]^[2] On the other side, the monarchist paramilitary movement Bela Ruka (created in 1912) has a more traditionalist approach, and by 1920s its members became a proeminent force in the First Yugoslavia after World War I.

At the rise of Nazi-Fascism in Europe and the outbreak of World War II, Yugoslavia faced its first dissolution, and for the first time the rise to power of anti-Serbian Yugoslav separatist forces in secessionist territories — the most successful being the fascist Independent State of Croatia that made severe campaigns of killing and persecution of Jews and Gypsies and persecutions, killings and forced conversion of Orthodox peoples to Catholicism (Bosnian Muslims were tolerated by the Catholic ledarship for political reasons of that time).

At the end of Word War II, relations between Serbs, Croats and other peoples of Yugoslavia were deeply embittered by what happened during the years of 1941-1945 (like the Jasenovac concentration camp and the battles of Chetniks and Yugoslav Partisans guerillas for power). To avoid more dividing conflicts, the Communist Slovenian-Croat Yugoslav ditactor Josip Tito imposed a federalized, socialist and non-religious composition on the Second Yugoslavia, based mainly on a official policy and the promotion of a Yugoslav cultural identity and a common Serbo-Croatian language. Regional nationalist and religious movements were harshly suppressed.

When Tito died in 1980, the power sharing of Yugoslavia was resolved by a rotating presidency consisted of the leaders of each Socialist Republic and elected by the eight Yugolsav political entities (Central Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Slovenia and Vojvodina) in a manner somehow similar to the presidency of Switzerland.

But when the Eastern bloc started to crumble at the second half of 1980s, once again the Serbian nationalism raised between Yugoslav Serb politicians. This time the movement had a overtly religious-militaristic approach, with widely-publicized slogans like “Serbia for the Serbs” and “Only Unity Saves the Serbs”, culminating with the Slobodan Milosevic speech at Kosovo in 1989.

Serbian cross on the flag of the Serbian Orthodox Church

The rotating presidency was dissolved in favor of a Serbian-based one; the autonomies of Kosovo and Vojvodina were abolished, and the Serbian cross, which previously didn’t appear even in the Coat of Arms of Socialist Serbia, began to be used everywhere. The Serbian Orthodox Church, once neglected, resurged with unprecedent force due to a great Serb religious awakening — expressed in constructions like Saint Sava, a immense Orthodox church built in Belgrade during the 1990s-2000s.

As a consequence of this, the radicalization of Serbian (and other populations of Yugoslavia) nationalism reached high levels that culminated on ideas of creating a Greater Serbia from a Yugosavia that began to fall apart in 1991 with the independence of Croatia and Slovenia at the end of june of that year. These factors ignited the Yugoslav Wars that ravaged through the former territory of Yugosavia for ten years.

Nowadays Serbian nationalism has been seen in a very controversial light by many scholars around the world. While generally non-Serb former Yugoslavians, Western World mass media and scholars and pro-Atlanticist forces see the Serbian nationalism in general and the radical Greater-Serbia idealists in particular as the main responsible for the scourge of Yugoslav Wars (mainly the massive cruelties in Bosnian and Kosovo Wars), for many in Serbia, in Bosnian Serb Republic, in Slavic-Orthodox countries like Serbia’s tradional ally Russia and anti-American, anti-Atlanticist and pro-Eurasianist circles, the Serbian nationalism should be seen in a positive light since it was responsible for liberating the Serbs from the Atheist-Communist Yugoslav yoke and for keeping Serb people togheter and united in times of hardship and aggression from Neo-Fascists, Muslim terrorists and NATO armies.