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Description
Since the time of Herder (1744-1803), language has been recognized as an important element in defining national identity. Modern scholarship, however, is divided on the source of language's importance; some scholars emphasize its function as medium of communication while others stress its symbolic role in defining a community. Using Croatian linguistic nationalism as a test case, this thesis engages the debate by evaluating models of language's relation to the emergence of nationalism. The case is of interest because of two paradoxes: the major role of language in the assertion of Croatian national identity despite the Croatian language's mutual intelligibility with Serbian, and the lack of significant language reform in post-independence Croatia despite the pre-independence nationalist narrative of an erosion of the language's distinctness. To resolve these paradoxes I investigate four periods of Croatian history. First I analyze how well the early nineteenth-century Illyrian movement—Croatia's first national movement—fits each of five models of language's role in the emergence of nationalism: Ernest Gellner's functionalist model, the communications-based perspective of Karl Deutsch, Eric Hobsbawm's state-centered theory, the "Imagined Community" model of Benedict Anderson, and Anthony Smith's ethnosymbolist approach. I then evaluate how well each theory can explain the role of language during three subsequent periods of nationalist mobilization in Croatia: the era of rivalry between Yugoslavist and "state right" Croatian nationalists in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Croatian fascist regime of World War II, and the movement to establish a Croatian state (circa 1967 to 2005). I conclude that Hobsbawm's state-centered theory best fits the Illyrian movement, and best explains the development and paradoxes of Croatian linguistic nationalism over time. However, Croatian nationalism displays continuity with premodern aspects of the country's culture and politics. Therefore Hobsbawm's model would be improved by a synthesis with ethnosymbolism's stress on the role of premodern legacies in modern political movements. Moreover, the survival of Croatian linguistic nationalism in a globalized international system and information-oriented economy calls into question Hobsbawm's (and others') prediction of the end of nationally-oriented politics.
