HISTORY: Croatia Through History: The Making of a European State, By Branka Magasv Saqi, 743pp. £45 THE RECENTLY deceased great American anthropologist Clifford Geertz commented once that it is only in a country unfamiliar emotionally and topographically that one needs poems and road maps, writes Sinisva Malevsevic
With the echoes of the Yugoslav wars of succession long gone it seems Croatia now represents this terra incognita that calls for a greater scrutiny. While the mid and late 1990s brought us a profusion of poetic accounts of the region, what is still lacking is a sound historical topography. As the fog of the 1991-1995 war of independence has completely cleared, now is the right time to pursue a scholarly study of the country's development through the ages, since history is best written and served cold. Because it was an integral part of the various imperial projects - Roman, Venetian, Ottoman, Napoleonic, Habsburg, and monarchist Yugoslav among others - Croatia's history has largely remained invisible and unknown to the wider audience.
Branka Magasv's book is an authoritative attempt to shed light on the development of Croatia from the early Middle Ages to the end of the 20th century.
She traces the origins of Croat statehood to the eighth-century Roman province of Dalmatia and explains its early-medieval split into the Triune Kingdom of Slavonia, Dalmatia and Croatia proper, a division that was to remain in place, in one form or another, until the beginning of the 20th century. Magasv also analyses carefully the impact of the various European wars and the importance of the military border that separated the Habsburgs from the Ottomans, and explores the importance of language and cultural policy, as they later proved essential weapons in the various competing state claims over the population that inhabits the territory of today's Croatia.
However, the main focus of this book is the political history of the 19th and 20th century - the age of nationalism and intensive state building. Magasv provides a detailed and highly complex account of the birth, expansion and conflicts of national ideologies in the Habsburg empire - the shifting alliances among its Austrian, Hungarian and Slavic components and the sheer instability, absurdity and arbitrary character of this multi-ethnic polity. It is interesting to see how, in their search for legitimacy, Hungarian and Croatian national movements clashed in their interpretation of a 12th-century document, Pacta Conventa, allegedly signed by the Hungarian king Coloman and the Croatian nobility, which bound the two lands together for centuries. While for the Croatian side this was a clear sign of a mutual agreement that secured "uninterrupted Croatian statehood", for the Hungarian side it was proof that Croatia was an integral part of Hungary, gained legitimately by dynastic right. Magasv also chronicles the dynamics of relations between Croatian and Serbian political elites, the early enthusiasm of Strossmayer and Racvki's Illyrian movement that tended towards the unity of South Slavs, the conflicting understandings of Yugoslavism, and the eventual crystallisation of distinct Serbian and Croatian national ideologies in the 20th century. The troubled experience of monarchist Yugoslavia, the brutality of the fascist puppet Independent State of Croatia (1941-1945), the particularities of the Yugoslav state socialist experiment, and the violent birth of an independent republic are all extensively elaborated.
Magasv has written by far the most comprehensive history of Croatia currently available in English. It is an erudite, scholarly and extremely detailed account that covers quite well all the important facets of this highly complex and for the most part troubled history. While some of its interpretations are likely to be contested by Serbian, Italian and possibly Hungarian historians, and there are sporadic emotional slips and biases, the general approach is evenhanded and impartial.
However, as the author's narrative clearly favours continuity over historical contingencies, aiming as it does to emphasise the durability of the Croatian national and state idea over the centuries, it is occasionally prone to the presentist interpretation of the past. This is most pronounced in the author's treatment of the concepts of nation and national identity, to which are occasionally attributed a perennial, that is trans-historic quality.
For example, one encounters statements such as "the Gothic king fashioned the mould in which the Croatian nation was cast", "Croatia would thus enter the age of Ottoman wars with a crystallised sense of national identity" or "Croats have been a majority in Istria ever since the Middle Ages".
In a similar vein, the vernaculars spoken through the region before the 19th century are regularly referred to as the "Croat" language (eg 16th-century local clergy are described as preaching in "Croat"). This view clearly neglects the inherent complexity and ambiguity of the popular ethnic attachments before the age of modernity. It's not just that the great majority of the inhabitants at that time were illiterate peasants who spoke diverse Slavic vernaculars, whose sense of identity was principally local and confessional, and who could not possibly conceptualise the world in national terms, but even the intellectuals, priests and political leaders, as is so evident from Magasv's own account, had a multiple sense of belonging - Croat, Illyrian, Slav, and South Slav/Yugoslav.
Hence, apart from the small circle of cultural and political elites there were no Croats or Serbs, just as there were no Italians or Hungarians, in a sociologically meaningful sense, before the age of nationalism. It is only with the proliferation and later institutionalisation of national/ist ideologies, the standardisation of vernaculars, and the general transformation of the social structure that identities become politicised and ethnic ambiguities broken. Notwithstanding this oversight, Magasv has written a highly valuable book - not heroic or tragic poetry but a clear and useful guide to the origins of present-day Croatia.
Sinisva Malevsevic lectures in political sociology at NUI, Galway. His latest book, Identity as Ideology: Understanding Ethnicity and Nationalism, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2006