Photograph Source: Marko M. – Attribution
The fundamental issue Serbian societies (in Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina / Republika Srpska) face with Croatian nationalism lies in the fact that, despite the existence of comprehensive and high-quality studies on its pre-modern origins and modern evolution—its political, cultural, and legal dimensions—authored by scholars such as Radivoje Radić, Milorad Ekmečić, and Mirjana Stefanovski, the general knowledge about it remains alarmingly sparse or altogether absent. Beyond the bombastic ramblings of Šešelj, with slogans like “Virovitica – Karlovac – Karlobag,” or the ever-recycled query “Where are the graves of Croatian kings?”, the public discourse in Serbian regions exhibits a strikingly underdeveloped understanding of the historical processes that shaped, and through various means expanded, Croatian national consciousness.
The simplification of highly complex processes
These questions are particularly sensitive for Montenegro’s fragile post-Yugoslav society, which is grappling with deepening social defragmentation. This fragmentation stems from the divide between Serbian nationalists, who see themselves as inheritors of the original Serbian character of the Montenegrin state; Montenegrin nationalists, whose primary aim is to sever the ties between Serbian and Montenegrin identity; and the potent influence of neighboring Croatia—not only upon the Croatian minority along the coastal regions, but also on the very construction of a new Montenegrin national identity itself.
Thus, the Serb Orthodox parish priest of Tivat, Mijajlo Backović, perhaps justifiably frustrated with the haughty posture of official Zagreb toward Montenegro, declared that “until the Second World War, in the Bay of Kotor (a bay on the Montenegrin coast—ed.), Roman Catholics always identified themselves as Bokeli, or Serbs”; that “Ivo Andrić and Meša Selimović bear witness to this,” and that within the scope of a certain (unnamed—ed.) project, “a Croatisation of the Bay’s Roman Catholics occurred,” during which they were “forcibly pushed to become Croats.” However, very little of that holds true. The fact is that many Roman Catholics in the Bay identified themselves regionally, and some indeed as Serb Catholics—just as today, some identify as Montenegrins of the Roman Catholic faith. Nevertheless, the initial stirrings of their gradual gravitation toward the Croatian national idea trace back well before the outbreak of the Second World War.
And no, not in the 7th, 10th, or 12th century, as Backović will be rebutted by the often uninformed agitators from the Croatian (and Montenegrin-nationalist) side, who will clumsily cite the mythologized medieval narrative from the 13th century known as the Chronicle of the Priest of Duklja or the Bar Genealogy, attempting to establish an unprovable thousand-year continuity between today’s Bay of Kotor inhabitants and the mythical Dukljan Red Croats. Rather, we must turn to the late 17th century, when the Russian traveler, Count Pyotr Andreyevich Tolstoy, recorded that “the town of Perast belongs to the Albanian principality (i.e., the Bay of Kotor — ed.), and there live many Serbs of the Greek faith,” but also that “Croats live there: sea captains, astronomers, and sailors.”
Indeed, how could there be Croats in Perast at the end of the 17th century, when—according to the projections of Šešelj-style ideologues—they theoretically cannot exist there at all? For the uninitiated, Vojislav Šešelj is a Serbian radical nationalist ideologue, known for his theory that all peoples who speak the shared Shtokavian dialect are, in fact, former Serbs who must be renationalised—if necessary, by force—so that the Serbian state may stretch to the borders of Virovitica, Karlovac, and Karlobag in Croatia.
If we take into account that the Mediterranean of that time — including the Venetian Republic, which ruled over the entire Bay of Kotor — was a vibrant and dynamic world in which goods, money, and people of various ethnic backgrounds flowed freely, and along with them, ideas about what it even meant to belong to a given nation, and if we set aside the possibility that the Perast Croats encountered by Count Tolstoy were in fact seafarers and intellectuals from Dalmatia or their descendants, living in one of the cities of their Venetian state — then the real question emerges: what, truly, lies at the root of this phenomenon?
How does this Croatian presence in Perast at the end of the 17th century align with the testimony written just two decades later by the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Bar and Primate of Serbia, Andrija Zmajević, who was based in Perast? In his account, he refers to his shared Montenegrin origin with the Serbian Patriarch Arsenije Čarnojević, describing himself as “by ancestry a compatriot, a friend, and a fellow steward of the aforementioned Kingdom of Serbia (in which we ourselves, though unworthy, now hold office according to the customs of the Holy Roman Church).”
Are we, perhaps, dealing with early forms of national self-identification that must be understood within the multicultural framework of the Venetian world? Might this be a case of transitional, layered ethnic belonging—one not yet aligned with the narrower, Romantic-era and ethnically rigid definitions of nationhood? Or could it, rather, be an instance of early cultural assimilation within the maritime-mercantile milieu?
All of these are legitimate historical hypotheses—ones that demand we move beyond both political myth-making and simplified ethnonational narratives, whether they emerge from the Serbian (or Montenegrin) side or the Croatian.
A misunderstanding of the pre-modern concept of the nation
However, the Serbian side in Montenegro continues to grapple with the construct of “Dukljanstvo” — a pseudo-historical narrative rooted in the political ideas of Ante Starčević and his ideological successors, such as Ivo Pilar, Milan Šufflay, Dominik Mandić, and Savić Marković Štedimlija. This narrative, now stripped of its overt Croatian identity, is perpetuated by ideologues like Dragutin Papović. The concept, currently promoted as the foundation of a Montenegrin “homeland” identity, is essentially an adaptation of the old Red Croatian ideology — an ideology that, during the Second World War, served as a template for the genocide and forced assimilation of the Serbian population in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
It is therefore crucial to understand the origins of the idea that medieval Serbian lands such as Dioclea (the majority of present-day Montenegro) and Raška (roughly present-day southwestern Serbia) are inherently Croatian — and why this notion, at its inception, did not carry the overtly malignant character it would later assume. We have already mentioned the medieval narrative, the so-called Chronicle of the Priest of Duklja, which recounts the mythic tale of a ruler of the South Slavs — Svetopelk. He is said to have, in an unspecified historical period, divided his vast realm into Zagorje, or Surubia (comprising Serbia and Bosnia) and the Coastal region (White and Red Croatia).
It is crucial to understand that medieval geste were, above all, political programmes. Their purpose was to glorify, legitimize, or mythologize the origins of a particular power, people, or state. In doing so, facts were often submerged in a mélange of oral tradition, legend, personal interpretation, and outright invention. All of this served the political interests of those who commissioned such works.
The historian Tibor Živković identified the Croatian Ban, Paul Šubić, as a possible patron of the Chronicle. During his ascent in the 13th century, Šubić harbored ambitions toward the Serbian crown, and thus required a “historical” work that could present those ambitions as both legitimate and deeply rooted in history. Precisely for this reason, despite the strenuous efforts of politicized Croatian historiography in the 19th and 20th centuries, we find not a single trace—neither in historical sources nor in monuments—of Red Croatia or its supposed capital, Dioclea (an ancient city on the site of present-day Montenegro’s capital, Podgorica), in the era to which this imagined polity is retroactively ascribed. Yet this does not mean that the uncritical acceptance of the Chronicle’s claims would not go on to inspire the ideas of Croatian pre-modern estate-based nationalism and its Illyrian pan-Slavist ideological orientation—an intellectual current that predates, by centuries, the chauvinism and racialism of the founding ideologue of modern Croatian nationalism Ante Starčević in the nineteenth century.
From Pan-Slavism to Pan-Chauvinism
The most important intellectual figure in this regard was undoubtedly the Croatian historian, writer, and lexicographer of German descent, Pavao Ritter Vitezović (1652–1713), who may rightly be called the father of pan-Croatianism—a doctrine according to which not only all South Slavs, but all Slavs by origin, are in fact Croats.
In his memorandum Responsio ad postulata, Vitezović presents an expanded vision of Croatian territory, which, in addition to Croatia in the narrow sense, Dalmatia, and the islands, also encompasses Istria, Carniola, Bosnia, and Serbia. This conception of Croatia closely aligns with the Habsburg aspirations for territorial expansion during the Great Turkish War. On the other hand, in his work Croatia, Vitezović draws significantly narrower borders for Croatia, defining them along a line from the Raša River to the Sava and Cetina, including the County of Livno and all Dalmatian islands. In the treatise Dissertatio Regni Croatiae, he offers an even more precise delineation, reducing Croatia to the area between the Sava River, Borovo Mountain, and the mouth of the Cetina. However, in the work that resonated most widely, Croatia Rediviva (“Revived Croatia”), Vitezović ascribes to Croatia a vast territory stretching from the Baltic to the Black and Adriatic Seas, encompassing even Hungary. Yet, in the memorandum Regia Illyriorum Croatia, he returns to the original vision laid out in Responsio ad postulata, though this time omitting the Slovene lands.
Vitezović’s imagined Croatia—rooted not in historical fact but in ideological construction—is fundamentally built upon a revival of medieval Croatian feudal law, which he seeks to anchor as firmly as possible in a mythic past. This conceptual framework would later be adopted in the 19th century by Ante Starčević. However, unlike Starčević, Vitezović exhibits no trace of Serbophobia—unlike another Croatian pre-modern estate-based nationalist, Juraj Ratkaj. Quite the opposite, in fact.
In collaboration with contemporary Serbian intellectuals and clerics—most notably the future Metropolitans of Karlovci, Sofronije Podgoričanin and Hristifor Dimitrijević—Vitezović authored the first comprehensive history of the Serbian people, which also served as a political blueprint for the restoration of Serbian statehood following the expulsion of the Ottomans: Serbia Ilustrata (“Revealed Serbia”). A significant influence on Vitezović, as well as on the controversial claimant to the Serbian throne, Count Đorđe Branković, and his Slavo-Serbian Illyrian state-building ideology—which traced Serbian origins back to the Roman king Servius Tullius—was the Serbian Orthodox Bishop of Jenopolje, Isaija Đaković.
Disillusioned with the Habsburgs for prioritizing Europe’s dynastic wars, Vitezović began to place his hopes for the liberation of a “revived Croatia” from the Ottomans in the hands of Peter the Great’s Russia. As a result, the verses he composed about the Serbs began to take on the tone of a pan-Slavic panegyric:
„After all, the original term “Syrb,” from which derive “Syrbal,” “Syrblanin,” “Syrbsko,” and so forth, in Latin would mean “itch” — and it might well be imagined that, indistinguishable from their fellow Slavs, the Syrbli took their nickname precisely from this word. They, like the others, are collectively known as “Slavs,” which means “the chosen” or “the glorious.” Yet some call themselves Hirvati or Ervati, from hrvanje, meaning “warlike”; others Hirli or Hrli or Vrli, meaning “valiant”; still others Vandals, meaning “the last to arrive”; some Pazinase, meaning “guard thyself”; and others by yet different names. But (according to my firm belief), the Syrbli were named for their itch — that burning desire — for heroic glory, for plunder, and for new homelands.“
Although Serbia Ilustrata remained largely unknown due to the death of its author, Pavao Vitezović, in 1713, and that of his patron, Metropolitan Dimitrijević, a year earlier, its ideas did not simply vanish. Chief among them was the concept that Serbs were “Croats by wrestling” (i.e., by arms, by struggle)—an idea which, even before Serbia Ilustrata was written, had very likely circulated among Roman Catholic Slavic-speaking intellectuals and ecclesiastical circles in the Habsburg Monarchy and the Venetian Republic, likely at Vitezović’s own instigation.
Over time, through the influence of the intellectual elite, this narrative drew the Croatian name ever closer to the Roman Catholic populations originating from former Serbian lands—especially in the coastal regions. This development was entirely in line with broader European nation-building processes. The reason lay in the increasing conflation of the Croatian name with the medieval term Latinin (Latin Christian), while the Serbian name became more firmly tethered to Orthodoxy as the dominant religious tradition—despite figures like Andrija Zmajević or Ivan Tomko Mrnavić, who saw no contradiction between Serbian national identity and Roman Catholic faith.
And yet, religious affiliation would (or came to) emerge as the decisive factor in shaping the dominant national self-identification of the majority among both Catholic and Orthodox populations.
The 19th century, however, ushered in an entirely new reality. The title of “Father of the (Croatian) Homeland” was not bestowed upon the pan-Slavist and Serbophile Pavao Ritter Vitezović—who, over the course of his shifting views, repeatedly claimed that Serbs and Croats were more or less one and the same—but upon Dr. Ante Starčević, a legal scholar. In the spirit of proto-fascist social Catholicism, Starčević, in his lesser-known work The Name Serb (Ime Serb), reinterpreted Vitezović’s Serbs—those supposedly driven by an “itch for heroic glory”—as a people whose very name derived from a disease (the itch), and who, by their very nature, represented a contagion.
There is little need to elaborate on what such racist interpretations meant during the Second World War.
The Futility of Croatian and Serbian Chauvinism
Today, when the leading populariser of Starčević-style pan-Croatianism, Marko Perković Thompson (a singer whose music glorifies Ustaše fascists from the Second World War), can draw crowds of up to half a million in the heart of Zagreb, it is vitally important for the intellectual elite of the Serbian people—especially those in Montenegro—to confront such phenomena with maturity. That means not with the fabricated bombast of Šešelj or with grim throwbacks to the rusty-spoon-eye-gouging rhetoric of the 1990s, but with the reminder that nations are not finished products, as if tossed into the world fully formed from some nationalist deity’s magician’s hat—they are living communities, engaged in a constant process of construction and reevaluation.
Indeed, Serbian criticism of contemporary Croatian nationalism must, at its core, return to the incisive yet analytically sober critique of Starčević’s Rightism offered by Jovan Skerlić—a critique that remains startlingly relevant even today:
“In the second half of the 19th century, when political and social ideals had been fully developed, when political and national movements everywhere had acquired a social or at least an economic dimension, he (Ante Starčević) remained an anachronistic medieval jurist, entirely antiquated in his obsession with the dead ideal of ‘historical right.’ Nothing could be more futile than his attempts to base the people’s struggle entirely on legalistic grounds, and nothing more paradoxical than his appeal to medieval contracts and charters—at a time like this, in this grim age of the ‘right of the stronger’ and the revival of the ‘law of the sword,’ when international law has become a cruel irony for subjugated peoples and oppressed lands, and when treaties concluded only yesterday are flung underfoot without the slightest regard.”
However, to adopt such a mature approach once again, it is necessary to reclaim a Skerlić-like intellectual maturity—something light-years removed from the current synergy of Dragoslav Bokan-style Ljotićism and Dragoš Kalajić’s nazi neopaganism, which has dangerously drawn the very concept of the Serbian nation closer to Starčević’s sterile, estate-based model. Half a million Thompson fans gathered in the heart of Zagreb sends a chilling message—not only to the few remaining Serbs in Croatia, but to the Serbian people as a whole.
Yet an even greater danger lies with those within that people who clearly cannot hide their regret at not having a Starčević of their own, a Tuđman (a radical Croatian nationalist and Croatian president who led the Croatian independence movement from Yugoslavia during the 1990s) of their own, or a Thompson of their own—to marshal them, glorify them, and sing them into the fold of a “New Europe.”
© Counter Punch
