The Fight for a Slavic Nation

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Brian Daurelle

The Fight for a Slavic Nation

19 March 2008

        The middle and late parts of the nineteenth century were the last ages of the multi-national empires which had dominated Europe previously.  New states were being set up with borders determined by the geographical distribution of certain national groups, as per the doctrine of Self Determination; the old empires which had governed over whatever territories and peoples they could conquer were crumbling into antiquity.  It was in this environment that the idea of a unified nation for the scattered and diverse people known as Slavs was born.  Though there are several ways to define which people were Slavs and which were not, the groups in question were the Poles, the Ukrainians, the Czech, the Croatians, the Serbs, the Slovaks, the Bulgarians and the western Russians.  The case for a pan-Slavic nation was ill-defined and hard to argue, because the Slavs as a group had little in common, and because the Slavs were widely scattered across Eastern Europe. The argument for a pan-Slavic nation centered around the formation of a powerful nation-state, with a theme of the Slavic people throwing off the oppression of the old Empires, but the case against such a nation argued that the Slavs did not have enough in common to have a full nation, and that the formation of a Slavic state would be an invitation for other great powers to take advantage of the new nation.  

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        The most obvious way to define the Slavs would to be though their language- several languages including Czech, Slovak, Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian, among others.  However, most of these languages are not mutually intelligible, which would make for incompatible relations between regions if they existed in the same state.  Additionally, many people who were of Slavic ancestry may have spoken German, Russian, Italian, Greek or Arabic, depending on where they live.  A Polish autor, Karol Sienkiewicz, clearly states the case against pan-Slavism by saying that there is no common Slavic language, literature, culture or even Homeland, and that putting the ...

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