CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Balikic, Lucija |
|---|---|
| Title | Integral Yugoslavism as Political Modernity in the Political Language of British and French Liberals around the Great War |
| Summary | This thesis portrays the British and French understanding of integral Yugoslavism around the Great War by analyzing the political language of liberals, the institutional context around them (with special attention given to the complex relationship between governmental and non-state knowledge production), and their contacts with the integral Yugoslavists from the Southern Slavic areas, mainly the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the Kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro. Through the highly-contextualized tracing of conceptual history of the key concepts of political modernity (mainly nationhood, statehood, and democracy) this thesis portrays a dialogue and an intellectual exchange between the experts and the public moralists of the Great Powers, as well as those who aimed to create an independent South Slavic state upon the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. &#x 09; &#x 09; The main argument hereby delivered is that the crisis of liberalism—which gradually deepened from the turn of the century onwards—enabled a supraethnic integral nationalism to enter the political language of the British and French liberals. Together with the developing epistemologies around racial science, statistics, and international relations, this nationalism placed them in the position of arguing for the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the establishment of a unitary Yugoslavia. &#x 09; &#x 09; The thesis concludes that integral Yugoslavism did in fact represent a form of political modernity for the British and French liberal intellectuals around the Great War, but also that this was in part the result of a polysemic use of the key concepts and the neo-Hegelian idealistic approach to the international relations these liberals practiced. Furthermore, the conclusion also states that it was these key concepts and arguments, derived from the political language of integral Yugoslavism, which came to inform the overall conceptual change of the main facets of political modernity and international order by the British and French, thus highly impacting their reasoning in the Versailles Peace Conference and tailoring both the successes and the failures of the interwar period and perhaps beyond. |
| Supervisor | Trencsényi Balázs |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/balikic_lucija.pdf |
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