The anti-Yugoslavist narrative on Croatian ethnolinguistic and racial identity, 1900-1941

This article examines the work of leading anti-Yugoslavist Croat intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century in relation to the question of race. These scholars used the discipline of racial anthropology in order to attempt to disprove the tenets of the racial supranational ideology of Yugoslavism by highlighting the ethnolinguistic-racial differences between Croats and Serbs. According to these intellectuals, the Croats were, racially speaking, purer Indo-Europeans and Slavs than the Serbs, who were in turn defined as possessing a strong Balkan Vlach racial component. Interestingly, these anti-Yugoslavist thinkers adopted the anthropological theory of Aryan-Slavic origins, as previously espoused by pan-Slavist Croat ideologists in the nineteenth century, in order to debunk the very idea of South Slav 'national unity' between Croats and Serbs.