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Socialism, Nationalism and Modernism in Fin de Siècle Croatia

At the beginning of the 1890s, the processes of industrialization and capitalist transformation were only slowly picking up the pace in Croatia. Nevertheless, the tide of mass politics that had swept over Europe made its way into Croatian politics and public space. From the early 1890s, socialist organizations and parties emerged. Yet, at the same time, bourgeois politics remained firmly entrenched in earlier liberal-nationalist traditions, even though they proved more and more inefficient in the changing social and political circumstances. From 1895, a new generation emerged which sought to reform the mainstream Croatian politics in accordance with the new social, political and artistic movements which they observed abroad. After being expelled from the University of Zagreb for burning the Hungarian flag during a visit of the Emperor Franz Joseph to Zagreb, the student leaders continued their studies in Prague and Vienna. There they encountered new, mass political practices and methods, as well as modernist artistic and literary movements. Their goal became to appropriate these developments in such a way that they could be applied to the existing social and political conditions in Croatia, which were much less developed than in Bohemia or Austria. On this basis emerged a political and cultural movement, most commonly called the Movement of the Mladi (‘the Young’). The ensuing result was inevitably an eclectic mélange of different, sometimes even contradictory ideas. These contradictions manifested themselves in polemics and debates within the Movement, but also in the Croatian public space. The years around 1900 were marked by a harsh public polemic between the Mladi and the Stari (‘the Elders’), the representatives of older liberal-nationalist traditions in Croatian politics and culture. This polemic touched upon the fundamental notions regarding the concept of Croatian culture, national(ist) politics and different views on society at large. In this paper I wish to investigate this polemic with a focus on the different usages and interferences of ideas and notions stemming from contemporary socialism, nationalism and modernism. The main focus will be on the ways in which the historical actors appropriated concepts from contemporary intellectual and cultural currents, with a special emphasis on socialism, and modified them according to the specific Croatian context.

socialism ; nationalism ; modernism ; fin de siecle ; Croatia ; debates ; appropriations ; intellectual history

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