Unkovski-Korica, V. (2016) World War II and the national question: the origins of the autonomous status of Vojvodina in Yugoslavia. Europe-Asia Studies, 68(10), pp. 1712-1735. (doi:10.1080/09668136.2016.1257700) This is the author’s final accepted version. There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite from it. http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/120446/ Deposited on: 01 July 2016 Enlighten – Research publications by members of the University of Glasgow http://eprints.gla.ac.uk 1 The Second World War and the National Question: The Origins of the Autonomous Status of Vojvodina in Yugoslavia Dr Vladimir Unkovski-Korica Lecturer in Legacies of Communism Central and Eastern European Studies School of Social and Political Sciences University of Glasgow
[email protected] Abstract This article investigates the origins of the autonomous status of Vojvodina in post-war Serbia and Yugoslavia. It charts the formation of national and regional consciousness among Vojvodina’s Serbs, Germans and Hungarians, from Habsburg times to the Second World War. It then argues that Nazi Germany’s racial war radicalised national tensions in Vojvodina. Nazi defeat resulted in the brutal expulsion of Vojvodina’s Germans, making Serbs for the first time a majority. The region’s claim to autonomous status after the war therefore clashed with the national-territorial principle applied to federalism by the victorious Communist Party of Yugoslavia, causing frequent friction and instability. Article1 The borderlands of Eastern Europe and the Balkans witnessed violent processes of nation-state formation in the nineteenth and particularly the twentieth centuries.