1920s AD

East European Quarterly, Winter, 2005 by Ervin Dolenc

I encountered the issue of cultural development and its comparability among individual regions in researching cultural policies (2) in Slovenia and Yugoslavia between the two world wars. My search through the relevant literature yielded no older theoretically grounded work addressing such issues in this region, so I am therefore attempting to establish the basic structure of such comparisons myself. The work that comes closest to my own efforts is embodied in Martin Mayer's excellent Elementarbildung in Jugoslawien (1918-1941), (3) with its wealth of statistics, although it does not share the same goals and would therefore not suffice for this study, even if in all other respects it goes well beyond satisfying these requirements. I found good methodological pointers in the detailed analysis of Janez Sagadin's article of the development of primary education in Slovenia from 1869 to 1941. (4) Statistical analysis in the large book about the cultural politics in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia by Ljubodrag Dimic is unfortunately not comparative. (5)

This article discusses certain fundamental categories which would facilitate the measuring of a specific level of cultural development in an individual historical region. For the sake of greater sensitivity such measurement must embrace both the most universal categories and those which would indicate the specific features of the individual region. The universal categories of such measurement comprise for example the ability to read and write, the number of students in primary, secondary, professional and tertiary education per 1000 inhabitants and so forth. The statistical categories which would indicate the specific features of the individual region in its cultural development would need to take into account the numerical ratio between the urban and rural population, the differences between elite groups and the average, the development of the civil society and so forth. For instance, one characteristic feature of the south-eastern regions of Yugoslavia was the concentration of an agrarian population even in large settlements, which served to reduce the differences between urban and rural people. (6) Despite the general lack of cultural development, it would be hard to speak of any cultural backwardness within the narrow elite of that society, for it attained a relatively high cultural standard. This and similar specific features of the individual region should be clearly evident in the statistical data. Indeed similar differences to those found in cultural development exist in economic and social development, while all three aspects are closely interwoven and interdependent. Yet the standard reviews of Yugoslav history highlight the economic and social diversity while ignoring that of culture. (7) A definition and structural classification of statistical categories, which would show the main elements and specific features of individual historical regions in cultural development, would make possible a synchronic and diachronic comparability in the broader European space.

The main sources are the deliberately very broadly spread and standard state publication The Statistical Yearbook of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (Statisticki godignjak), which was published regularly for the years between 1929 and 1940, and the results of the population censuses of 1921 and 1931. (8) Relying on generally widely spread and easily accessible sources of information and where possible the simple processing of data should enable the application of categories and comparisons defined here also in the wider environment. The first analysis of data from official statistical publications has been done through a selection and adding up in tables and graphs, and the second through commentaries on these graphic presentations relying on the relevant literature. (9)

I

Much as the Italian politicians discovered after the unification of Italy, immediately after 1918 the key problem and essential feature of cultural politics for certain Yugoslav politicians lay in how they could establish a common national identity following the setting up of the new state. Yet the concept of Yugoslavs was still insufficiently established at the start of their common path, particularly in the dominant part of the new country. For the majority Serbs the name Yugoslavia did not sound Serbian enough, while for the others, primarily the Croats and Slovenes, it was still not clear what Yugoslavia was really supposed to mean: simply politically administrative state union, or also a cultural and therefore linguistic and ethnic, and in some distant ultimate sense probably also religious, union. Their linguistic peculiarity allowed the Slovenes right from the start to distinguish themselves ethnically from the national community. The Croats based their sense of national distinctness on the old feudal state traditions and on Catholicism, which was the one thing that clearly separated them from the orthodox Serbs, with whom they were otherwise territorially very intermingled. Particularly at the beginning of the common state, the political and intellectual groups that argued in favour of a gradual merging in all areas, in other words integrative Yugoslavism, were numerous and quite strong in all parts of the country. Nevertheless, they were still a minority in all parts of the country. Following the first failures and disappointments with the new common state, this enthusiasm rapidly dwindled, especially after the forced adoption of the centralist Vidovdan constitution of 1921. In Croatia the Yugoslav integrative ideology was already a spent force in the 1920's. And in the beginning of the thirties the last intellectual group in Slovenia admitted defeat in creating the new Yugoslav nation. The last to give up the project of an integrative Yugoslav nation were the intellectual circles of Serbia in the middle of the thirties. (10) The fact that the idea of an integrative Yugoslavism failed and, following the death of King Aleksander in 1934, was officially replaced by the concept of Serbianism, Croatianism and Slovenianism as the cornerstones of the Yugoslav community, was brought about in significant measure by the large, indeed huge, cultural diversity of the new state.