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Croatian Intellectuals and World War I: Between Croatia as Bulwark of Mitteleuropa Towards the West and the Other Way Around

World War I has been quite extensively studied in the Croatian historiography hitherto. However, most of the scholarship has been devoted to political history, or to the study of a single political faction. Thus, this paper will offer a comparative study of the adversary ideas on the nexus between World War I and Croatian nation- and state-building ideas. It will be shown that three main ideas had crystallized during World War I. The idea advocated by numerous young intellectuals of the Croatian Yugoslavist orientation was anchored in the concepts of a single Yugoslav nation adjacent to eastern Slavic messianic tradition, where the future South Slavic state should act as a bulwark of the East against German imperialism. The adversary idea was advocated by the Croatian national exclusivists  most notably by their most outstanding intellectual Ivo Pilar  with a central concept of the supremacy of the German kultur concept whereby Croatia should serve as the outer frontier of German Mitteleurope against “Byzantine East”. Finally, there is a third intellectual discourse, the one of the Peasant Party leader Stjepan Radić, presenting a peculiar synthesis of the aforementioned adversary ideas. In order to make the exposed ideas more comprehensive, the paper will start with the outline of the Croatian national identity-building processes until the war.

Intellectuals ; Croatia, World War I

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