When Prince Regent Aleksandar of Serbia proclaimed the establishment of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes on 1 December 1918, the new state, which was supposed to represent the realization of a centuries-old dream of the South Slavic unity, existed in name only.1 Now that all the Yugoslav âtribesâ2 were liberated and united according to the principle of national self-determination, many supporters of the Yugoslav cause believed the possibilities for development of the new country were ample. Yet they, as well as those skeptical of the possibility of bringing together communities that had been separated throughout their histories, were aware of Yugoslaviaâs predicament. The country inherited radically different constitutional, legal, economic, educational, and cultural traditions that reflected the divergent historical trajectories of its regions and communities. Despite rich histories of its individual constitutive groups, in its early days, the country could not have been described in concrete terms. In fact, for quite a while after Aleksandarâs proclamation, some of the most obvious markers of its statehood remained unknown. How many people lived in the country? Where were its borders? What was its optimal internal administrative arrangement? What infrastructure was to be built in order to improve the communication within it? What was the structure of its economy and which of the problems were to be addressed first? As if these questions were not already difficult enough to answer, the search for answers was further complicated by the ongoing disagreement regarding fundamental issues such as whether Yugoslavia should be a republic or a monarchy, and, in the latter case, what kind of monarchy; should it be a centralized or decentralized, unitarist or federalist state; and what was the nature of relations among Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Was it too late to make Yugoslavs out of them or was it worth a try? Was there a future for Yugoslavia without Yugoslavs?
As a result of the First World War, answers to similarly fundamental questions had to be updated in many European countries, especially the newly created and recreated countries in East Central Europe and in those that experienced significant territorial changes. Even if some of these issues in Yugoslavia eventually seemed to be resolved, the search for the geographical âessenceâ of the country continued throughout the interwar period, and was renewed and persisted for decades after Yugoslavia was recreated at the end of the Second World War as a result of a successful partisan resistance movement. The opposition to the Yugoslav state persisted as well, and in fact intensified during the 1920s and, in particular, the 1930s among the Croatian intelligentsiaâand beyond.3 However, the temptation to identify entire national communities with one political position and a shared opinion toward the sustainability of a Yugoslav state should be resisted, for the political landscape in the country, with its fast-changing and often unprincipled alliances as well as stubborn rivalries, was complex even for the standards of volatile politics of interwar Europe. Getting to know what Yugoslavia was and what it could have become was a delicate task that, besides political will, required participation of various experts, who supplied ideas and lent their professional authority to often conflicted political projects.
Geographers as Nation Builders
This is a book about a particular scientific discipline whose practitioners played an exceptional role in making and breaking interwar Yugoslaviaâgeography and geographers. The book argues that geographers, more than any other group of experts, found themselves in a unique position to address the above-mentioned, politically sensitive questions, for they could provide accounts of Yugoslaviaâs past, present, and future. As time and space, that is, geography and history, appeared inextricably connected, geographers examined the physical and cultural landscapes of the new country in the present, but they could also reflect on the history of Yugoslav âtribesââespecially the ways in which geography had affected itâand the prospects of Yugoslavia by comparing it with European countries old and new, which they believed resembled Yugoslavia in geographical location or compositionâand therefore historical destiny. The book examines the intertwined histories of geography in and geography of interwar Yugoslavia.4 It is a study of the relationship between geography as an emerging science in the academic landscape of the South Slavic lands, geographical works dealing with Yugoslavia, and various political projects in an unprecedented historical context. It is not a political history of first Yugoslavia, though it is largely framed by the events of 1918, when the country was created; 1941, when it disintegrated under the combined pressure of the foreign invading armies and internal discontent; and, to an extent, 1945, when it was recreated under the rule of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. Politics play an important role in the book for another reason. As members of a small intelligentsia, many Yugoslav geographers actively participated in political life of the first half of the twentieth century, transgressing the supposed boundary between their roles as scholars and policy-makers, or at least policy-influences.5 Their readership could easily interpret the political overtone in their works, even when these were presented as apolitical, objective science. The scientific language of geography enabled the formulation of competing answers to the underlying question what Yugoslavia was and what could it have (not) become. To answer the question why and how geography came to play such an important role, the book takes into consideration different geographical traditions and trends within Yugoslavia, communication between them, and the communication of Yugoslav geographers with their colleagues abroad that all facilitated transfer of ideas.
Importantly, the book is not yet another study on the Serbian geographer Jovan CvijiÄ (1865â1927), usually the only geographer from Yugoslavia that comes to mind even of specialists in the field. (At least until recently, when the Croatian geographer Filip Lukas (1871â1958), as I explain in Chap. 6, became a politically polarizing figure in Croatia.) CvijiÄ is indeed an unavoidable topic in any attempt to write a history of geography and its political engagement in interwar Yugoslavia but, as a result of an almost exclusive focus on him, the existing literature has neglected whole sets of fascinating encounters of geographers, their ideas, and their political implications, in the area between Ljubljana in the northwest and Skopje in the southeast. This is the first book that brings all of them together. Influential as CvijiÄ was in articulating the geographical narrative on Yugoslavia, parts of which continue to echo in its successor states to this day, the book demonstrates that it were other, less known geographers, such as Lukas, the Slovene Anton Melik (1890â1966), and a number of their colleagues, who offered politically pertinent geographical lessons to the population of Yugoslavia about their new homeland, with far-reaching resultsâoften further-reaching than CvijiÄâs .
Historians have spilled much ink writing about CvijiÄ and various segments of his vast oeuvre, to the effect that he has been talked about in scholarly literature more than his works were actually read while he was alive. CvijiÄ, unlike other Yugoslav geographers, was internationally renowned for his work in geomorphology (primarily on the Karstâa type of rugged terrain characteristic for much of the Balkansâand glaciation, a popular contemporary research topic), but it was his 1918 La PĂ©ninsule balkanique that made him famous. Yet the book that became a classic and has seen many republications since it first appeared in Serbo-Croatian translation in 1922 (first part) and 1931 (second part) had a peculiar reception in interwar Yugoslavia. It was obvious from its content that CvijiÄ wrote it with foreign readers in mind and before the country was actually established. As a result, it did not address some of the issues that became hotly debated soon after the country was established. Lukas would become the most outspoken critic of CvijiÄâs narrativeâdespite the fact that he adopted many of CvijiÄâs conclusions and that they were intellectually indebted to the same geographical traditionâbut other geographers also took part in what was an exceptional permeation of geography into the public discourse, either by venerating, criticizing, or simply ignoring CvijiÄ .
Nationalist Geographical Narratives
Part of the reason why geographical narratives of Yugoslavia were exceptionally successful was because they complemented rather than contradicted the existing historical narratives. Throughout Europe and beyond, historiography has played a critical role in inspiring nationalist sentiments and formulating nationalist policies.6 In Yugoslavia, however, geography went further and offered a more applicable and persuasive apparatus to think about the common South Slavic state than historiography could. The latter, after all, struggled with devising a synthesis rather than a collection of parallel histories of Yugoslaviaâs nationalities well into the second half of the twentieth century. Where political and cultural histories of the South Slavs pointed to separation, geography could offer a seemingly plausible unifying framework. Geographical works served as âinventoriesâ of the new country, introducing readers to regions mostly unknown to them, which until recently had been parts of different political entities that used to wage wars against each other for centuries. From early on, many geographical works constructed an image of Yugoslavia as a ânaturalâ geographical unit, thus presenting it as a country built not only by the will of its people(s), but also grounded in something difficult to disputeânature itself.7 At a time when environmental determinism played a significant...