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Were Imperial Geographies Useful in Post-Imperial East Central Europe? The Yugoslav Perspective

In the late days of the First World War and the immediate post-war period, when the map of Europe, and other parts of the world controlled by European colonial powers, was being redrawn at the Paris Peace Conference, an ironical situation occurred. Geographers, who had largely been trained in “imperial”—most prominently, German—geographies, came to play an unprecedented role in the global affairs. Many of them applied their expertise to “break” the very empires that the geographical “language” they used had been designed to help “build.” Geography, it turned out, was a far less exact science than its practitioners believed, and there were different ways to interpret one and the same map. In contrast to the situation in other East Central European countries, in the newly created Yugoslav state geography became the most prominent political-cum-scientific discourse after the country’s borders were (temporarily) settled, when the focus was shifted to internal concerns. The search for the “essence” of the new state and the conceptualization of relations between its regions and titular ethnic groups was largely conducted within the framework of the German “imperial” geographical tradition. The paper addresses the usefulness of the notion of cohort in intellectual history and points to the limitations of relying on the “old” geographical paradigms as well as the possibilities it opened for creative (though selective) and politically conflicting readings in the 1920s and 1930s.

Yugoslavia ; geography ; interwar period ; intellectual history

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