JUGOSLAVENSKA MISAO, BOSNA I DRŽAVNOST BOSNE I HERCEGOVINE
THE YUGOSLAV IDEA, BOSNIA, AND THE STATEHOOD OF BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA

Summary/Abstract: Ever since its first appearance in the late 17th century, the Yugoslav idea has been the expression of the aspiration of the southern Slav peoples to unification. Particularly prominent features in the history of this idea are Ljudevit Gaj’s Illyrian movement and the views and politics of Štrosmajer and Rački on bringing about the cultural unity of the southern Slavs. Unlike the democratic concept of Štrosmajer and Rački, Grašanin’s Nacertanija programme insisted on Serbia’s leading role in forming a Yugoslav state on the ruins of Austria and Turkey, by merging first “Serbian” lands and then Yugoslav countries. All Yugoslavia’s socialist parties adopted the Yugoslav idea as their national programme from their very formation. Although they belonged to opposing warring blocks, at the end of World War I the southern Slav peoples resolved to create a new, Yugoslav state, in which Serbia would achieve hegemony between 1918 and 1941. At the end of World War II, as the achievement of the National Liberation Movement’s war of national liberation from the occupying forces, a federal Yugoslav state was set up, in which Bosnia and Herzegovina enjoyed a position of equality with the other federal entities. At every stage of the democratic-leaning Yugoslav movement, Bosnia was a historical region as an organic component of the future state. Based on Garašanin’s Načertanija, Greater Serbian hegemony wiped out every form of autonomy for Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Yugoslav idea, with its original determinants and characteristics, was of epochal significance in the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina, regardless of certain inadequacies in the forms and methods by which it was brought about politically. It was with this idea that, in 1943, Bosnia and Herzegovina experienced its revival as a state after almost five centuries of existence within state systems that deprived it of its standing as a political subject.

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