Između demosa i etnosa – koncept hrvatske nacije u govorima predsjednika Franje Tuđmana
Between Demos and Ethnos – the Concept of the Croatian Nation in the Speeches of President Franjo Tudjman

Summary/Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to analyze the political speeches of the Croatia’s first President Franjo Tudjman in the light of Anthony D. Smith’s tripartite typology of ethnic, civic and plural concepts of nationhood. Its goal is to determine which one of these models President Tudjman had been advocating and whether his views on this matter had been stable or if they had varied through time. The underlying premise is that Tudjman - as the leader of the Croatia’s (armed) struggle for independence and as an authoritative figure in the Croatia’s semi-presidential system of the 1990’s - played a pivotal role in modelling the Croatian national self-concept in the first decade of its statehood. The qualitative content analysis showed that Tudjman’s first speeches in the year 1990 had had an almost ideal-typical civic structure with their emphasis on civil rights and duties of all citizens of the Republic, regardless of their ethnic background. However, already in 1991 his rhetoric changed drastically due to the outbreak of the Serb rebellion in Croatia and the following Serbian military aggression. Henceforth, Tudjman’s discourse had been laden by often vitriolic remarks against the Serb minority, culminating in the hate-speech in Knin after the Croatia’s decisive military victory against the rebels in the summer military operation “the Storm” of 1995. Nonetheless, even in the belligerent period between 1991 and 1995, the rhetoric of the first President of Croatia always included a civic component, as well as hints to a possible pluri-national solution of the conflict epitomized in his repeated references to the Serb “national rights” within Croatia. Tudjman’s post-war speeches continued to move to and fro between ethnic and civic ideal types, revealing the President’s deep-rooted internal conflict amid the two paradigms. It can be concluded that Tudjman’s hybrid concept of the Croatian nation corresponds to the dualistic process of Croatian nation-building from the second half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, which, due to specific circumstances, followed parallel routes termed by Smith as “nation-to-state” and “state-to-nation”. It is, therefore, reasonable to believe that it will continue to influence debates on the Croatian national self-understanding in the future.

• Details
• Contents