On Croatian identity

[Monolith]

You can consider yourself "Croats", "Serbs", "Bosniaks" as much as you want, you can hate each other as much as you want, but OBJECTIVELY you are one people.
By whose objective criteria? Also, positing that South Slavic exist because of hate or mutual animosity, presumably caused by religious differences, is a laughable fallacy.


One thing you are right (although it has nothing to do with ethnicity) is that West South Slav people has always been divided on tribal ("collective memory" as you call it) criteria.
I fail to see how an identity created around the historical remembrance of medieval Croatian kingdom, its native dynasty and its uninterrupted continuity in Austria-Hungary is tribal in any way. As such, it already includes many different regional groups that are in some way connected to this tradition of statehood, while at the same time it excludes those who are deemed unrelated to it. Hence the inclusion of Bosnian Muslims into Croatdom at different times, due to overwhelming part of them being descended from the same ancestral population of the medieval Slavs affiliated with the Croatian kingdom.


Unlike Romanians, for example, or Russians, or Germans, it never had a name for itself and never had a conscience of its unity.
South Slavs don't fit in any of those national models because of an unprecedented historical development of the region. Trying to establish a nation by superimposing an inorganic ethnic identity on the existing ones is a fool's errand, especially if you're dealing with a situation where your potential nation is located on the crossroads of civilisations.

Mind you, e.g. Russians are more linguistically homogeneous than much less numerous Slovenes.


In 19th century, when the unity of West South Slavs was posited, various names were attempted to have them united within a single concept (Illyrian, Yugoslav), none withstanding the test of time. Governments during royal and communist era have never attempted to break these IMAGINARY barriers and create a nation: moreover, they played on tribal animus to further their personal agendas. Events of 1990s followed as a natural consequence of this irresponsible government...
Quite the contrary. Both Yugoslav regimes tried to create Yugoslav ethnic identity. The first attempts were made during the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and they were called 'Integral Yugoslavism' and 'Yugounitarism'. That was the official ideology after the January 6th Dictatorship ('One folk, one king, one state'), and was observed in calls for national unity because supposedly the old tribal divisions were no longer needed. It ultimately failed to assimilate the existing identities and Banate of Croatia was established as a result.

Yugoslav ideology was especially rampant during the second, socialist Yugoslavia, when both Yugounitarism and Integral Yugoslavism were heavily promoted by the omnipresent 'Brotherhood and unity' doctrine. In Croatia, that eventually led to Croatian spring and Declaration on the Status and Name of the Croatian Literary Language. Yugounitarism backfired in the end, since the organic identities soon obliterated the artificial one, with some tragic consequences.

Very interesting comment... The fact that the French never had a FEELING of ethnicity doesn't mean they weren't an ethnicity.
...which effectively reduces ethnicity to some obscure, materialistic concept. It is already well-defined. No need to improve it.

[aherne]

Interesting comment... Ethnicity is not a tribe, it is not bound by "feelings" of family. As a matter of fact, in the vast majority of peoples around the world, people are unaware of the ethnic group they have been assigned to by western scholars. What matters is what is: ethnicity is, in terms of biology, a subgroup of animals still not homogenous enough to form a race, but yet closer to each other than to any other group. By all possible criteria, West-South-Slavs form one ethnic group, with differences equal to those within Romanians. The purpose of Yugoslavia was to build up a nation-state for this ethnic group (although it included large tracts of lands inhabited by other peoples). The problem is that this ethnicity, like the Czechs-Moravians-Slovaks, never had a name of itself or any unity based on common past. Perhaps this destined the idea of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia to disintegrate. Regardless of that events, these nameless peoples still form an ethnic group. Yellow finches may hate other yellow finches, but still are yellow finches.

When I was little, I used to watch cartoons and sports on Yugoslav TV. I remember seing football games between Serbian and Croatian teams within Yugoslav championship who more often than not ended in vicious fightings between supporters after the game. Unbeknown to them, they looked the same and spoke the same language. It was impossible to determine who's Serbian and who's Croatian and they would have attacked themselves randomly if they wouldn't have been dressed in their teams' colors. Your "nations" are just that: battling football teams, where supporters (such as yourself) imagine themselves to be as different as night and day, but in the end live in the same blocks.