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National Identity in the Works of Tadija Smičiklas: Regarding the Origin of the Croats and the Croatian People
Petar Korunić
Sažetak
In this article the author discusses Croatian national identity as presented in the works of Tadija Smičiklas and the influence of his ideas on contemporaries. In the first part of the article, the author discusses the concept of identity in general, ethnic and national identity in Croatia in the nineteenth century, and the current state of its research in Croatian scholarship.
Tadija Smičiklas, as a Croatian intellectual and historian who wrote about the history of the Croatian people, profoundly analysed the process of creation of their national identity in his works. As early as the time of his studies at the University of Vienna (1865-1869) Smičiklas pointed to hrvatstvo (the Croatian name and the specific rights of the people) as a value on which the Croatian people must base their national identity. This was the beginning of his systematic research of the Croatian national identity, the identity of Croats (as an ethnonym) and of the Croatian people (as a compact national community) during their long history. He particularly stressed these concepts in his synthesis of Croatian history, and in many other studies in which he searched for the identity and individuality of the Croats and the Croatian people. This had a particular influence also on his work as editor of historical sources, most notably in his principal work in this field, Codex diplomaticus regni Croatiae, Dalmatiae et Slavoniae.
While discussing the cultural, political and social history of the Croatian people from the earliest times up to the middle of the nineteenth century, Smičiklas places particular emphasis on those terms defining Croatian particularity and the identity of that people over the centuries (the Croatian name, the Croats, the Croatian people, the Croatian language, the Croatian state, the Croatian kingdom, Croatian territory, and so on). Thus, these terms for Smičiklas are not questionable – even from the beginnings of Croatian history in the Middle Ages. The Croatian people have a distinctive identity; they are a people of Slavic origin which retained its Slavic characteristics, but the development of this people’s identity was influenced by the wider context of the European cultural, political and social system.
Smičiklas looked upon ethnic and national identity, that is, the development of “national individuality,” as a continuous process. He maintained that every people, if it does not develop, reconsider its values and progress, necessarily dies out and vanishes. This central idea can be found in all his historical writings. He held that the Croatian people developed their identity after their arrival in the new country (in the territory of the Late Antique Roman province of Dalmatia), through the organisation and development of the Croatian state (the Kingdom of Croatia), based on Slavic/Croatian customary law and customs, particularly under the influence of Christianity and Christian culture and the Western political, governmental, cultural and social system. However, after losing their independence, further development of the people’s national individuality depended on those influences which they continuously received from Europe and their capacity to develop and organise themselves, to build independently all those values (cultural, political, legal, of statehood, and economic) which would preserve the people and finally unify all its segments in the greater whole: the Croatian nation.
Ključne riječi
Hrčak ID:
15822
URI
Datum izdavanja:
1.3.2001.
Posjeta: 3.053 *