Stefan Troebst
Slavicity
Patterns of identity, framework of analysis, myth
The idea of an element binding all Slavs or Slavophones in space and time comes in many forms: "Slavicity" acts periodically as a effective instrument for political mobilisation. It directs cognitive interest in cultural studies research and remains to this day a highly productive myth in art and literature. The rise of a new dimension of Slavicity is to be expected through the influence of the "Slavisation" of the European Union.

Hans Lemberg
Hej Slované!
The Slavic idea among Czechs and Slovaks
Czechs and Slovaks, close neighbours and co-habitants in Czechoslovakia during the short twentieth century, relied on the Slavic idea in the nineteenth century. The more the national movements matured, the more the Slavic Idea receded into the background, without being fully given up. The fixation on Russia as a pillar of support, and later on the Soviet Union as "liberator," overlapped with the Slavic idea. That was one of the reasons why it faded in the second half of the 20th century to a faint myth.

Martina Baleva
Martyrdom for the nation
The Slavic Balkans in the painting of the nineteenth century
In the beginning was Delacroix. He gave expression to Greece's striving for independence. After that, artists from East Central Europe directed their interest to the Balkans. They dedicated numerous pictures to the anti-Ottoman uprisings of the south Slavic peoples and made their cause well-known. In doing so, they fell back on archetypical motifs of occidental tradition, thus creating the narrative of national martyrdom and stereotypes about the Balkans. With their oeuvre, they influenced the self-perception of the Slavs and facilitated their nation-building. At the same time, the artists implicitly criticized political conditions at home and expressed their own national ambitions.

Ute Raßloff
Hungarian, Slav, Goral, Slovak
Janosik as mythic folk hero
Legends are the storehouse of the history of ideas. The development of the Slavic idea in Slovakia, for example, can be derived from the figure of the Carpathian thief Juraj Janosik. The historical Janosik took part in the uprisings of the Hungarian nobility in the 18th century and was later executed as a thief. The fathers of Pan-Slavism made him a Slavic epic hero. On the eve of the Revolution of 1848, poets declared Janosik a Slovak national hero. But only in Neo-Slavism were ethnic traits attributed to the figure. These did not disappear either, when the figure was stylized into a social rebel in the 20th century and a partisan in the communist era. Today, the figure is an icon of pop culture that is exploited commercially and politically.

Markus Krzoska
Historical mission and pragmatism
The Slavic idea in Poland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
In Romantic-era thought, Poland was to play a leading role in a Pan-Slavic federation. However, identification with the Slavic community always stood in contradiction to Polish-Russian antagonisms. During the Second World War, the "eternal" German-Slavic conflict took centre stage. Poland made new contacts with its Slavic neighbours. The Soviet Union had little interest in this. After 1948, the Slavic idea served Moscow as a means of propaganda to secure its influence in East Central and Southeastern Europe. In Polish exile, the Slavic idea continued to make itself felt. It has yet to disappear from Poland's culture, but its political significance is marginal.

Jan C. Behrends
"Soviet Rus'" and its brothers
The Slavic idea in Russia's long twentieth century
In the twentieth century, the Slavic idea appeared in three variations: as Neo-Slavism in the late tsarist empire, as Pan-Slavic rhetoric in high Stalinism, and as splinter in the post-Soviet search for Russian identity. In each case, propagandists invoked the Pan-Slavism of the Tsarist empire. That shows the power of 19th-century national myths.

Georg von Rauch
A tactical weapon
Soviet Pan-Slavism: a documentation
The question of a Slavic community was alien to Soviet foreign policy before 1941. Pan-Slavic tendencies were considered a reactionary side-effect of tsarist imperialism. In the Second World War, the Pan-Slavic myth was reactivated. Behind the Soviet Pan-Slavism of the postwar era stands the goal of dismantling the national uniqueness of other peoples so that they dissolve in the Soviet melting pot. Thus Pan-Slavism became a tactical instrument.

Vladimir Claude Fisera
Communism and the Slavic idea (1920 – 1946)
From the Communist Balkan Federation to the All-Slavic Committee
After the First World War, the Slavic idea, in a variety of forms, played a role in concepts of inter- and intra-state order formulated by the Communist parties of East Central and Southeastern Europe. In the 1930s, the Soviet Union occasionally deployed the Slavic idea to legitimize its foreign policy interests. After Nazi Germany's attack on the Soviet Union, Communist and Slavic ideology nearly melded into one. After the Sovietization of East Central Europe and the break with Tito in Yugoslavia, Moscow tossed the Slavic idea overboard.

Sylwester Fertacz
On brothers and sisters
The All-Slavic Committee in Moscow 1941 – 1947
After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Moscow launched an All-Slavic Committee. Its goal was to mobilise the resistance of Slavs in the occupied countries and to solicit support abroad. After the war, the committee functioned increasingly as an agency of Soviet propaganda. The Committees of Slavic Unity in East Central Europe came under growing ideological pressure. What had been an institution of Slavic cooperation gradually became an instrument of Stalinist subordination. The quarrel between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia ended the era of Slavic cooperation.

Rumjana Mitewa-Michalkowa
The rise and fall of the Slavic idea
The Slavic Committee in Bulgaria, 1944 – 1991
As in other East European countries, a Slavic Committee was founded in Bulgaria in 1944. Its history illustrates the tensions between the Slavic idea, Socialist ideology and national interest. After the Second World War, the fallback on the Slavic idea served the consolidation of Communist rule. After de-Stalinisation, a change of strategy took place in Bulgaria. The committee turned to Bulgarians abroad, who were encouraged to return to the Socialist homeland. The Slavic idea hardly played a role anymore. Starting in 1969, the committee engaged in pure state-sponsored Socialist propaganda.

Ludwig Elle
Among brothers
The Sorbs and Slavic solidarity in the twentieth century
In the 19th century, the idea of a Slavic renaissance also inspired the Sorbian national movement. The Sorbs kept up the closest of contacts with the Czechs. After 1918, some hoped that newly established Czechoslovakia would become the Sorbs' mentor. After the Second World War, there were even voices that called for Lusatia to be attached to the Czechoslovakia. Sorbian associations also built up relations with Poland and Yugoslavia in the postwar years. But a Slavic reciprocity that transcended rhetoric was uncomfortable for the Communist rulers. Only after 1989 could the Sorbs again build bridges to the Czech Republic and Poland.

Maria Bobrownicka
In, with, or against Europe
Slavic models of national culture
In the 19th century, thinkers from East Central Europe and Southeastern Europe were preoccupied with the culture of their respective nation and its place in Europe. On the basis of Pan-Slavism, there flourished a myth that placed the Slavic cultural model in contrast to the European model. This delineation, which fed on "late" nation-building and a concomitant minority complex, led to the cult of tradition and folklore. Prominent representatives of this thinking were Jan Kollar and L'udovit Stur. But there were also other currents: The Czech literary group lumirovci, for example, called for catching up with the "developed" European nations and reconciling the cosmopolitan and the indigenous, the aesthetics of the universal and the aesthetics of folklore.

Monika Rudas-Grodzka
Enslaved Slavdom
Messianism and masochism in Mickiewicz
The stigma of the Slavs as slaves has circulated widely since antiquity. Enslavement has a sexual connotation. Adam Mickiewicz assumed the historical verdict on the slavish nature of the Slavs. He made it the starting point of his deliberations on the disposition of the Slavic people. He lends it new meaning and integrates it into his messianic ideas. This messianism is masochistic. Mickiewicz raises national independence, which Poland had just lost, to political religion.

Agnieszka Gasior
Art and world peace
Alfons Mucha's "The Slav Epic"
Alfons Mucha is primarily known for his art nouveau posters. His monumental work, "The Slav Epic", went largely unnoticed. On 20 large paintings, he attempted to depict Slavic history from its beginnings to the present. At the centre of the series stood the idea of a Pan-Slavic mission: to overcome narrow nationalisms and to redeem humanity. Mucha arrived too late with this theme and its symbolic treatment for his homeland: Only today has there been a revival of interest in "The Slav Epic".

Anne Cornelia Kenneweg
Moral migraines
Krleza, Krizanic, and the (south)Slavic idea
The Croatian Dominican priest Juraij Krizanic is considered the first Pan-Slavist. In the 20th century, he played an important role in debates over the Croatian nation and South Slavic unity. One of the most important authors of modern Croatian literature, Miroslav Krleza, also devoted a great deal of attention to him. Krleza saw in the clergyman a figure whose life and work expressed the dilemma of a small nation on the periphery of Europe. A torn and marginalised intellectual, Krizanic was allegedly the prototype of a Croatian Don Quijote, and Krleza considered himself to be his successor – right in the middle of the Second World War.

Tatjana Petzer
Figures of unity
Rhetoric and reality of south Slavic integration
Southern Slavism strove for a community of all Balkan Slavs. Its currents pursued different political and cultural goals, but resembled one another in their rhetoric of unity. In common festivals, rituals, and construction projects, the idea of unity crystallised in concepts such as that of the "south" or the initially positively connoted "Balkans". In the course of the century, these forms of unity sparked enthusiasm, irony, alienation, rejection, and a new cautious interest. The political and cultural history of Slavic Southeastern Europe is reflected in the change of significance and function of unifying concepts and rituals.

Norbert Franz
Slavic (dis)course
German Slavic Studies and its subject-matter
Slavic Studies emerged as the "science of the Slavs" in the Romanticism of the 19th century. The academic study of the Slavs and the political striving for emancipation and (re-)unification were closely linked to one another. Thus the question of the common roots of the Slavic languages and the regularity of differences dominated the field. Since the end of the East-West conflict at the latest, the unity of Slavic Studies has been called into question. If one would not invoke simply the tradition of the field, the debate over the discourse of the Slavs could lead to a re-establishment of the subject in cultural studies.

Christian Lübke
Rise, fall, revival
The lines of development in Slavic research
For almost 200 years, German historiography assumed there existed some kind of unity of the Slavs. Among the Slavic peoples of East Central Europe by contrast, the idea of Slavic unity had already been replaced by national concepts of history during the nineteenth century. That Pan-Slavism had been transformed into a Great-Russian imperial idea also played a role in this process. After the expansion of the Soviet sphere of influence, Slavic studies in Eastern Europe and Western Europe flourished. Since the 1970s, and irreversibly since 1989, Slavic studies has been replaced by research grounded in structural and cultural history. In Russia and Belarus by contrast, Pan-Slavism has once again emerged on the ruins of the Soviet Union as the unity of the Eastern Slavs.

Frank Hadler
You old Slovak!
"Rational state historicism" instead of Slavic invocation
The Slavs who lived in the Greater Moravian Empire of the 9th century were long seen as the forefathers of the Czechs and Slovaks. Fifteen years after the end of the Czechoslovakia, the government in Bratislava, under the motto of a "rational state historicism," is challenging historians with the assertion that Greater Moravia was the state of "Old Slovaks" and Svatopluk, who died in 894, their king.

Wilfried Jilge
Fragments of unity
The idea of an East Slavic Community in Ukraine
In Ukraine, individual politicians and parties often evoke an East Slavic identity. In Ukrainian realpolitik, however, the idea of a unification of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine hardly plays any role. The call for East Slavic unity serves primarily to mobilise voters in the eastern and southern parts of Ukraine for anti-Western purposes. The integrative strength of East Slavic thinking remains limited.

Elena Temper
"The purest Slavic people"
Identity formation à la bielarusse
Belarus has not consolidated itself as a nation. The concept of a nation-state in the tradition of the French Revolution stands vis-à-vis the idea of a particular Slavic nation. President Lukashenka increasingly stylizes Belarus as the saviour of a "threatened Slavic civilization". The institutional anchoring of the Slavic idea at the state level makes Belarus an Antemurale Slavicum.

Tilman Berger
Potemkin in the internet
Slovio and pseudo-Pan-Slavs
In the Internet, there are numerous sites that promote the Pan-Slavic idea. The constructed language Slovio deserves consideration. Analysis of the organisation World Slavic Congress shows that this involves a largely virtual universe of Slavic emigrants who are trying to compensate for the Slavic states' loss of power. It is lacking in ideological coherence and real political weight.

Published 2010-01-21