The Use of History Croatian Historiography and Politics' Ivo
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The Use of History Croatian Historiography and Politics' Ivo Goldstein During the last years of former Yugoslavia the use of history for political purposes reached absurd levels. It was used to mystify the conflict everywhere. History has been used in all South-Slav countries and elsewhere in Europe ever since the days when modern nations and nation states were created. This began in the eighteenth and increased in the nineteenth century (the practice culminated in the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century). In nineteenth and twentieth- century Croatia the opinion prevailed that historical facts or postulates can readily be used for or against national interests and that writing about history is in part a political act. Nineteenth-century Croatia experienced attempts at Germanization based on the greatness of the German culture and Hungarian encroachment which was invoked on the Crown of St. Stephen. The twentieth century saw dissatisfac- tion with Belgrade's attempts at centralization and disregard for Croatian national qualities. Historical science first surfaced in Croatian politics in the sixteenth century, but not until the first half of the nineteenth century was it systematically used as a basis for the ideology of the national revival. Even when the name it relied on to unite all Croats, that of the indigenous pre-Roman inhabitants of the region, the Myrians, was based on unfounded historical perceptions about the creation of the Croatian and other South-Slav ethnicities. Croatian historians who did not succumb to the romantic and patriotic trend were the exception. Many, influenced by current politics, developed theses that modern historiography has in most cases rejected or fundamentally amended: there was a theory about the coronation of King Tomislav at an assembly on the Field of Duvno in about 925, although this never took place; it was said that the Croats defeated the Turks on the battlefield at Grobnik in 1242, which also never happened. The historiographic dispute that probably had the greatest immediate political influence was the controversy about the authenticity of the Pacta Conventa, a charter allegedly signed in 1102 by representatives of the Croatian kingdom and the Hungarian and future Croatian King Koloman. After 1830 Croats began to call on the document to prove they had a right to political autonomy and national independence, whereas Hungarian historians and politicians claimed it was an invention and a fake, that the Hungarians had defeated the Croats at the beginning of the twelfth century and the Croats had no right to political independence. Much was written in support of both contentions but there was little convergence of opinion until after 1918 when the Hungaro- Croatian association was dissolved. 1. This articleis a revisedversion of an articleearlier published in the first issueof Erasmus, ErasmusGuild, Zagreb, April 1993. 86 The politicians of the time interpreted and used history in an unusual way: the ideologist of Croatian independence and head of the Party of State Rights, Ante Starfevif, regarded men who were generally considered to be Croatian national heroes - Nikola Šubi? Zrinjski, the 1566 defender of Siget, and Josip - Jelafif, Ban of Croatia 1848-1859 as symbols of submission to hated Austria. Starcevic advanced the cult of Petar Zrinski and Fran Krsto Frankopan, two noblemen who were executed for conspiracy against the Viennese Crown in 16711 (according to propaganda by the Party of State Rights, from the grave they proclaim that their descendants will be martyrs until they have their state outside the Habsburg Monarchy). At the height of preparations to mark the 200th anniversary of their death, Starfevif's associate, Eugen Kvaternik, organized a revolt against Austria. In the second half of the nineteenth century the Yugoslav ideology developed in Croatia. One of its representatives, Bishop Josip Juraj Strossmayer, considered the ninth-century Slav missionaries Cyril and Methodius to be excellent symbols of this political objective, saying that they affirmed the Yugoslav 'nation' in Europe for the first time and symbolized 'Slav reciprocity'. He even tried to procure their canonization, which would be a sign that liturgy in the vernacular could be allowed. This would create conditions for uniting the Catholic and Orthodox religions, which was one of Strossmayer's great political ambitions. Between the Croatian and the Yugoslav Idea The relative freedom that followed the establishment of Yugoslavia in 1918 made it possible for politicians with varied beliefs to use history to spread their ideas. There was a good opportunity for this in 1925 at the celebration of the 'thousand years of the Kingdom of Croatia'. Some Croatia-oriented historians concluded texts about events in 925 with comments on the current situation: in their interpretation of conditions in the tenth and eleventh centuries, they claimed that Croats would find it very difficult ever to accept the 1918 agreement on unity with Serbia in its present form, because it diametrically opposed the basic idea of the thousand year long development of a self-relying Croatian state. For Yugoslav-oriented historians, on the other hand, the message from the tenth century was different: for example, they quoted examples of the tenth-century association between Croats and Serbs, when the Serbs found refuge from Bulgarian pressure in Croatia, to conclude that `1000 years had to pass before the two peoples could come together again on their primal path and resume the South 2 Slav phases The greatest Croatian twentieth-century writer, Miroslav Krleia (1893- 1981), had an original approach to history. He was not a historian and his method was literary and essayistic, but many of his observations are both lucid 2. V. Novak, 0 tisuégodišnjiciHrvatskog kraljevsla, Jugoslavenska njiva, Zagreb 1925,9, u, 6, pp. 169-176. .