| dc.description.abstract | This article explores how 'European civilization' was imagined on the margins of Europe in the
first half of the twentieth century, and how Balkan intellectuals saw their own societies' place
in it in the context of interwar crises and WWII occupation. It traces the interwar development
and wartime transformation of the intellectual debates regarding the modernization of
Serbia/Yugoslavia, the role of the Balkans in the broader European culture, and the most
appropriate path to becoming a member of the 'European family of nations.' In the first half of
the article, I focus on the inter-war Serbian intelligentsia, and their discussions of various forms
of international cultural, political and civilizational links and settings. These discussions
centrally addressed the issue of Yugoslavia's (and Serbia's) 'Europeanness' and cultural identity
in the context of the East-West symbolic and the state's complex cultural-historical legacies.
Such debates demonstrated how frustrating the goal of Westernization and Europeanization
turned out to be for Serbian intellectuals. After exploring the conundrums and seemingly
insoluble contradictions of interwar modernization/Europeanization discussions, the article
then goes on to analyze the dramatic changes in such intellectual outlooks after 1941, asking
how Europe and European cultural/political integration were imagined in occupied Serbia, and
whether the realities of the occupation could accommodate these earlier debates. Serbia can
provide an excellent case study for exploring how the brutal Nazi occupation policies affected
collaborationist governments, and how the latter tried to make sense of their troubled inclusion
in the racial ideology of the New European Order under the German leadership. Was Germany's
propaganda regarding European camaraderie taken seriously by any of the local actors? What
did the Third Reich's dubious internationalism mean in the east and south-east of Europe, and
did it have anything to offer to the intelligentsia as well as the population at large | en_GB |
