Slaveni, Goti i Iranci: teorija nordijskog "gospodujućeg sloja" i hrvatsko rasno podrijetlo u NDH

This article analyses race theory in the Independent State of Croatia in regard to the question of the ethnolinguistic-racial origin of the early medieval Croats. While there was debate in the NDH on whether the proto-Croats were specifically Slavs, Iranians or Goths in an ethnolinguistic sense, there was a general academic and ideological consensus that, in a racial sense, they were a ruling class of Nordic-Aryan origin. This topic is analysed within a broader European historical and ideological context, including the question of the position of National Socialist race theory toward Croats and other Slavic peoplesOvaj članak analizira rasnu teoriju u Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj s obzirom na pitanje etnojezično-rasnog podrijetla ranosrednjovjekovnih Hrvata. Dok se u NDH raspravljalo o tome jesu li Prahrvati posebno Slaveni, Iranci ili Goti u etnojezičnom smislu, postojao je opći akademski i ideološki konsenzus da su, u rasnom smislu, bili gospodujući sloj nordijsko-arijskog podrijetla. U radu se ova tema analizira u širem europskom povijesnom i ideološkom kontektsu, uključujući i pitanje odnosa nacionalsocijalističke rasne teorije prema Hrvatima i drugim slavenskim narodima

The ideal Nordic – Dinaric racial type: Racial anthropology in the Independent State of Croatia

This article has highlighted that a clear picture emerged of the ideal Croatian physical type in the NDH’s cultural media: the ideal Croat was of Dinaric type with a Nordic strain or ‘Nordic-Dinaric’ (i.e. tall, broad-headed with a long face and light pigmentation), descended from both the Nordic ‘Slavic-Gothic-Iranians’ of White Croatia and the predominantly Dinaric ‘Celtic-Illyrians’ of Dalmatia. The intellectual origins of the Ustasha idea of an ideal racial type can be traced to the pre-war studies of Croatian academics and writers interested in racial science. One should be cautious, however, in trying to establish a direct link between pre-war Croatian racial anthropology and the actual policies of the Ustasha regime toward non-Aryans in the NDH. On the other hand, the Ustasha regime certainly used race theory to justify racial policies. The Ustasha state was, in law and in practice, based on a racial Weltanschauung

INTELLECTUAL DISCOURSE ON RACE AND CULTURE IN CROATIA 1900-1945 (A reply to the article by Tomislav Jonjić, ‘From Bias to Erroneous Conclusions’, published in the Review of Croatian History, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2010)

Th e following article is a reply to certain criticisms made by Tomislav Jonjić in the Review of Croatian History, Vol. 6, 2010, in relation to arguments I presented in an earlier article on the Independent State of Croatia (RCH, Vol. 3, 2007). Th is article examines the intellectual and ideological discourse on race and cultural identity in Croatia in the fi rst half of the twentieth century. It highlights the important role racial anthropology played in the formulation of a distinct Croat ethnolinguistic identity in the works of leading anti-Yugoslavist intellectuals

Postcoloniality without race? Racial exceptionalism and south-east European cultural studies

The black Dutch feminist Gloria Wekker, assembling past and present everyday expressions of racialized imagination which collectively undermine hegemonic beliefs that white Dutch society has no historic responsibility for racism, writes in her book White Innocence that ‘one can do postcolonial studies very well without ever critically addressing race’ (p. 175). Two and a half decades after the adaptation of postcolonial thought to explain aspects of cultural politics during the break-up of Yugoslavia created important tools for understanding the construction of national, regional and socio-economic identities around hierarchical notions of ‘Europe’ and ‘the Balkans’ in the Yugoslav region and beyond, Wekker’s observation is still largely true for south-east European studies, where no intervention establishing race and whiteness as categories of analysis has reframed the field like work by Maria Todorova on ‘balkanism’ or Milica Bakić-Hayden on ‘symbolic geographies’ and ‘nesting orientalism’ did in the early 1990s. Critical race theorists such as Charles Mills nevertheless argue that ‘race’ as a structure of thought and feeling that legitimised colonialism and slavery (and still informs structural white supremacy) involved precisely the kind of essentialised link between people and territory that south-east European cultural theory also critiques: the construction of spatialised hierarchies specifying which peoples and territories could have more or less access to civilisation and modernity. South-east European studies’ latent racial exceptionalism has some roots in the race-blind anti-colonial solidarities of state socialist internationalism (further intensified for Yugoslavia through the politics of Non-Alignment) but also, this paper suggests, in deeper associations between Europeanness, whiteness and modernity that remain part of the history of ‘Europe’ as an idea even if, by the end of the 20th century, they were silenced more often than voiced

Boris Zarnik and his entry on race in the Croatian encyclopaedia (1942)

This article examines the short section on race theory found in the entry on ‘Man’ published in the fourth volume of the Croatian Encyclopaedia (the so-called ‘Ustaša’ Encyclopaedia) in 1942 and written by the Slovenian-born Croatian biologist Boris Zarnik. Since Zarnik criticised the idea of racism, or what he also termed ‘race theory’, in this entry, a number of historians and other commentators have claimed that Zarnik, and even the Ustaša government, were theoretically opposed to National Socialist racism. But through a close examination of both his pre-war articles on racial anthropology and the ideas expressed in his entry on race theory, this article will highlight that Zarnik’s position on race and racism was actually completely in line with the tenets of National Socialism

The ideology of nation and race: the Croatian Ustasha regime and its policies toward minorities in the independent state of Croatia, 1941-1945.

This thesis examines the central place of racial theories in the nationalist ideology of the Croatian Ustasha movement and regime, and how these theories functioned as the chief motive in shaping Ustasha policies toward the minorities of the Nazi-backed Independent State of Croatia (known by its Croatian initials as the NDH), namely, Serbs, Jews, Roma and Bosnian Muslims, during the years 1941 to 1945.This thesis is divided into three parts. The first part deals with historical background, concentrating on the history of Croatian national movements from the 1830s to the 1930s. The second part covers the period between the founding of the Ustasha movement in 1930 and the creation of the NDH in 1941. The third part examines the period of Ustasha power from 1941 to 1945. Through the above chronological division, this thesis traces the evolution of Ustasha ideas on nation and race, placing them within the historical context of processes of Croatian national integration. Although the Ustashe were brought to power by Nazi Germany, their ideology emerged less as an imitation of German National Socialism and more as an extremist reaction to the supranational and expansionist nationalist ideologies of Yugoslavism and Greater Serbianism. In contrast to the prevailing historiographical view that has either ignored or downplayed the significance of racial theori! es on Ustasha policies toward the minorities of the NDH, this thesis highlights the marked influence of the question of 'race' on Ustasha attitudes toward the 'problem' of minorities, and on the wider question of Croatian national identity.This thesis examines the Ustashe by focusing on the historical interplay between nationalism and racism, which dominated so much of the modern political life of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. The fusion of nationalism and racism was not unique to Ustasha ideology, but the evolution and nature of Ustasha racism was. Ustasha racial ideas were therefore the product of both specific Croatian and wider European historical trends. This examination of the historical intersection between nationalism and racism in the case of the Ustashe will, i hope, broaden our understanding of twentieth-century nation-state formation, and state treatment of minorities, in the Balkans and Eastern Europe