Project Description and Contribution to CAS ROH Project

The ideological narratives marking and largely directing the currents of nineteenth and twentieth-century history in Serbia and Yugoslavia still await their thematisation in the context of the realities they tried to create or, at least, influence. Within this framework, the notion of the ‘peasant' falls among some of the most noticeable ideological narratives, represented by numerous variations of what has been regarded a peasantist ideology (peasantism). As stated by Doreen Warrenir decades ago, ‘round "the peasant" in Eastern Europe there is an accretion of legend. There has been the romantic approach, part literary, part political, for which he is an absolute social value, a bulwark against social change". (Warriner, 1959)

Unlike agrarianism, which utilises a more economic-oriented approach, peasantism is a largely socio-cultural and anthropological notion. Peasantism implies a specific system of values, believes, and norms which addresses the peasantry less as an economic class or social stratum, rather than as a symbol embodying certain fundamental values of crucial importance for the group. Hence, interwar peasantism was primarily a tool of the identity-narrative.

As the peasantry was an important political force in a liberal electoral system, the peasants were frequently flatteringly likened to the ‘real' creators of the Serbian state. Yet, this loud peasantism of the intellectual ‘urban thinkers' went hand in hand with a general neglect of most existential needs of the peasantry. Deeply involved in politics, ‘urban thinkers' acted as the pillars of the regimes rather than as independent critics.

My research focuses on the intellectual constructs related to the peasantry in the first half of the twentieth century, their ideological operationalisation, and their symbolic transfer from a Serbian towards a Yugoslav, and eventually back to a narrow Serbian paradigm during the Second World War. I will argue that the same ideological content - the glorification of the peasantry - was politically instrumentalised as the legitimising pattern for the political and social programmes, shifting from democratic to totalitarian, from liberal to conservative, from modern to patriarchal. The peasantry became related to the identity of the nation, and it is my aim to re-create the interwar historians and anthropologists' role in this process.

My objective is to be achieved by the method of comparison, in two main ways: 1) by comparing one or more phenomena in one society or culture diachronically, or 2) by comparing one or more phenomena in two or more societies or cultures synchronically and/or diachronically. Here I will resort to a diachronic comparison of the peasantist ideology in three turning points in the Serbian and Yugoslav history - the first being the end of nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries (the period of the Radical Party - the main exponent of peasantism as a political ideology), 1918 (the year when the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was created and peasantism was used to serve the Serbian cause), and the Second-Word-War period, including 1945 (when the ideological narrative of peasantism was first appropriated by the extreme political right, and later included into the new, post-war ideological paradigm.

My research aims to utilise the achievements of those historiographical traditions dealing with continuity in history. Since continuity presupposes the existence of certain structures, my task is to investigate the conditions under which those structures survived and/or changed. I will adopt the so-called Wehler's model of ‘defensive modernisation' (Wehler, 1989) to explain how structures can change in order to preserve the continuity of the unchangeable substance.

My study also deals with the relation between mentality and ideology. The persistence of close ideological patterns in a course of the twentieth century raises the question of any possible correlation between a long lasting system of values (mentality) and a specific type of ideology, which includes collectivism, leader cult, egalitarianism, and antiurbanism.

My work is supposed to contribute to revealing and explaining one of the most relevant traditions in Serbian intellectual history, hoping also to provide relevant material for further investigations. The research will address the specific receptions and modifications of the values and institutions of modern western civilisation in Serbia and Yugoslavia during the first half of the twentieth century. Dealing with the problem of national identity and modernisation, it hopes to provide relevant data for a comparative analysis of the problem in a wider, Balkan and European context. My research also aspires to test the relevance of some historiographical traditions regarding the problem of nation-building in Serbia and interwar Yugoslavia, and thus possibly suggest some modifications to currently existing methodological paradigms.