Narratives of caesurae in the post-Habsburg space: the case of interwar Yugoslav Sokol activists and their reflections on the crisis of dualism
The narratives of rupture and historical change have often been taken at face value in historiographies of East Central Europe, with the intellectuals of various regimes narrating their exceptional novelty, distinction or even revolutionary character. In order to reflect on theoretical and methodological implications of going beyond the positivistic reading of the sources and uncovering the tendentious self-narration of ‘novelty’, this presentation will introduce the view of late Austro-Hungarian Monarchy espoused by the intellectuals of interwar Yugoslavia, who significantly contributed to its political instability and loss of legitimacy in the Southern Slavic provinces.
Through introducing the case of political thinkers involved in the nationalistic mass gymnastics movement of Sokol and their writings on the subersive activities undertaken in the ‘prison of the nations’, the presentation will focus on the question of their conceptualization the given transition. It will provide an insight into their understanding of the respective historical temporality and the concepts of political modernity, namely that of the nation, state and
democracy.
Their construing of the caesurae in spite of the rather tangible continuities in political life of the new state could be used as a useful starting point for generalizing more broadly on the new regimes’ tendency to self-narrate their novelty and difference, by dealing with the recent past in the anachronistic, eschatological manner, as well as with describing the previous regimes’ inevitable decline and over-stating their own role in bringing it down and thus being the protagonists of the historical change.
However, while the post-Habsburg thinkers initially used the concept of crisis to create a narrative in which Austria-Hungary was determined to fail in the face of natural political community such as Yugoslavia, and most other successor states – it was already from the mid1920s onwards that the issues faced by the new state, and an elusive horizon of expectation, prompted a shift of focus from narrating historical-political caesurae, to that of biological, metaphysical and cultural nature. Besides this moving away of the focus to the less tangible realms (and locating the ‘crisis’ itself therein), the 1918 caesura became less about the martyrdom under the last days of Austria-Hungary or transimperial division of Yugoslavs, but more about Yugoslavia’s birth defect – the inability of the modern nation-state, as initially imagined, to facilitate the creation of unity among Yugoslavia’s citizens.