Who Is Who in the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes: A Formal Analysis of Jovan Cvijić’ s Treatise on South Slav Unity

Abstract

The the paper explores the causes and effects of the ideological background of Jovan Cvijić’s anthropogeographical and ethnopsychological research in the former Yugoslav region of the Balkan Peninsula. The paper shows that Cvijić’s intellectual endeavors to forge a new Yugoslav identity, which he believed to be indispensable for the successful implementation of the South Slav state unification project, were based on ethnocentric premises that resulted in implicit " scientific" evidence about kinship among the South Slavs recognized through Serbian ethnic attributes. For Cvijić, therefore, the Yugoslav idea did not in essence have a supraethnic character; on the contrary, it was the Serbian identity that provided the basis of the Yugoslav "nation".