JUGOSLOVENSTVO I SRPSTVO MILORADA EKMEČIĆA (MARGINALIJE POVODOM IZLASKA SABRANIH DELA)

Abstract

The article provides a critical review of the collected works of renewed Yugoslav and Serbian historian and professor Milorad Ekmečić (1928-2015), which were published in 2021 in fifteen volumes. Author analyses Ekmečić’s key historiographical works and monographs, and points at Ekmečić’s continuity of his perception and representation of the Yugoslavhood during the most of his career. The article lists Ekmečić’s key points on the Yugoslav idea and Yugoslavism, as well as his changes to the Serbhood or exclusive Serb national idea after his forced movement to Belgrade during the early stages of war in Bosnia, 1992. It remains the key question that regardless of such obvious erudite approach in his works, Ekmečić missed to foresee the tragic faith of Yugoslav idea and the Yugoslav state as such. The article also points to one of the still ongoing dilemma on the war aims of the Kingdom of Serbia in the beginning of the First World War in 1914, which was the main subject of one of the Ekmečić prominent monograph. Did Serbia enter the Great War with the aim of uniting the whole Serbian nation or uniting all of the Yugoslav nations? The author also points that Ekmečić had a different chronological perception of the Serbian Revolution. It started in 1804 with the First Serbian Uprising and finished with the cease of feudal order in Serbia that occurred in 1835. It was the outcome which meant so much to the Serbs in the Principality of Serbia, liberated from Turks, which Ekmečić missed to note in his works.

Keywords

• milorad ekmečić
• yugoslavia
• yugoslavism
• serbia
• bosnia and herzegovina
• serbian revolution
• collected works of milorad ekmečić