PhD thesis defence by Oliver Pejic
The present thesis investigates the changing everyday relevance of nationhood in Lower Styria (today in Slovenia) and the Backa (today in Serbia) – two formerly Habsburg territories attached to the interwar Yugoslav state. Examining interactions between the population and local authorities, it traces the role that perceived or performed national belonging played in diverse spheres of life during the last years of Empire and the early years of the Yugoslav state. Putting ordinary people and local administrators at the center, it offers an empirically grounded bottom-up perspective of the 1918 post-imperial transition in Central and Eastern Europe and its diverse local outcomes. The thesis grounds its analysis in areas as diverse as citizenship acquisition, public and private sector employment, educational choices, and everyday social conflict. As the two regions exited the Habsburg imperial framework, their multinational populations found themselves inside a state that made South Slavic ethnolinguistic nationalism its legitimising ideology. All the while, nationalism and its demands were nothing new for people who had lived under the late Habsburg Empire. By focusing on concrete situations, the thesis shows the varying extents to which the Austrian, Hungarian, and Yugoslav legal frameworks enabled local administrators to pursue formal or informal nationalist policies within their spheres of jurisdiction. At the same time, the study also examines how ordinary people responded to nationalism’s demands as well as their own expectations from the new, national world. While the distinction between minorities and members of the titular nationality necessarily disadvantaged minoritized individuals in some spheres of life, subjective foreignness often had less weight in defining people’s access to certain privileges compared to objective foreignness, i.e., a lack of Yugoslav citizenship. Ultimately, the principled anti-revolutionary mood and legalism of the new authorities combined with a persistent legacy of ambiguous national belonging meant that the 1918 transition from imperial to national rule produced unpredictable outcomes on the ground.