Nation-building in Franjo Tuđman’s Political Writings
Nation-building in Franjo Tuđman’s Political Writings

Summary/Abstract: Detecting the gap in the existing literature of Franjo Tuđman’s political thought, this article comprehensively analyzes Tuđman’s nationalist ideology prior to the 1990s. Using a morphological approach to ideology, the article presents three main clusters of concepts regarding Tuđman’s ideology: the narrative on the nature of humankind as teleological struggle to achieve independent national states; the narrative of supranational ideologies – such as liberalism and communism – acting as a pure geopolitical means used by the great nations to subjugate small ones; and finally the narrative of the Croatian thousand-year long struggle to achieve an independent national state. Moreover, the article exposes how Tuđman already by the 1970s created the idea of an all-embracing national movement grounded in the synthesis of abovementioned teleological concept on Croatian history, which would eventually bring about a national reconciliation of Ustaša and the Croatian partisans in a final struggle for the independent state.

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