Modernism: The Creation of Nation-States

Anton Melik: A nation in the making

ANTON MELIK: A NATION IN THE MAKING Title: Narod, ki nastaja (A nation in the making) Originally published: Ljubljanski zvon (a monthly on literature and education ), Ljubljana, 1918, vol 38, issue 8. Language: Slovene The excerpt used is from the original, pp. 476–484. About the author Anton Melik [1890, Črna vas (Ger. Schwarzendorf, present-day Slovenia) − 1966, Ljubljana]: geographer and historian. He studied in Vienna between 1911 and 1916, and in 1927 received his doctorate in geography from Ljubljana University. He started his career as a secondary school teacher in Ljubljana. From 1938 to 1966 he served as a professor of geography at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana. From 1946 to 1950 he was the President of Ljubljana University. He served two terms as the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and was a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Until 1958 he was a deputy to the ‘People’s Assembly’ in Ljubljana. From 1911, his works, literary texts and later essays on political, social and economic topics in the new Yugoslav state, appeared in Slovenian and Croatian newspapers, frequently under his pen-name Loboda. After the First World War, he wrote several historical and geographical reference books, overviews and secondary school textbooks . He was the editor of the literary monthly Ljubljanski zvon (The Ljubljana bell). After the Second World War, he primarily concentrated on the organization and institutionalization of the discipline of geography in Slovenia. He also participated in the preparation of documents that served as the basis for the drawing of the western border of Yugoslavia. His close attention to natural, historical, socioeconomic and developmental features of the Slovenian regions made him a doyen of the discipline of geography in Slovenia. As the most prominent Slovenian geographer and one of the most prominent geographers in Yugoslavia, Anton Melik was a renowned public figure. His acceptance of administrative-political functions within the communist establishment and his political activity after the Second World War were seen by many of his contemporaries as highly controversial; some critics even accused him of power-mongering. However, Melik’s political activity after the Second World War can be attributed to his pre-First World War propensities. He welcomed the communist regime because it restored the western Slovenian border, stopped the German Drang nach Osten, and nationalized landed property. 354 FEDERALISM AND THE DECLINE OF THE EMPIRES Main works: Zgodovina Srbov, Hrvatov in Slovencev [The history of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes] (1919−1920); Jugoslavija. Zemljepisni pregled [Yugoslavia. A geographical overview] (1921, 1923); Kolonizacija Ljubljanskega barja [The settlement of the Ljubljana marshlands] (1927); Slovenija. Geografski opis [Slovenia: a geographical description] (1935, 1936); Amerika in ameriška Slovenija [America and American Slovenia] (1956). Context Melik matured during the period when the national awakening movement in Slovenia reached its peak. Like many of his contemporaries, Melik was driven, under the pressure of Germanization, to articulate a sense of (Slovenian ) national awareness. The result was his resistant and combative personal stance in a series of publications dealing with the issue of borders within the nation-state. Melik’s fundamental political stance rested on the conviction that because of the region’s geo-strategic importance, the Balkans were always destined to be at the center of European and global political developments . At the time of the disintegration of Austria-Hungary, many Slovenes were convinced that they would cease to have any contacts with Germans, not even on the economic level. After 1918, the cultural orientation of Slovenia completely changed. With the establishment of Yugoslavia, new horizons and opportunities were opened for Slovenian culture, but the centralist rigidity of the kingdom under the Karađorđević dynasty soon began to obstruct the national and cultural ambitions of the Slovenes. According to the 1921 census, more than 90% of citizens living in the Slovenian part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes were literate, while in other parts of the Kingdom this percent was only around 40%. In Slovenia, elementary schooling was incomparably more developed than the south-eastern regions of the country. However, the situation of higher education was quite the opposite. Unlike Zagreb and Belgrade, Ljubljana did not have a university. From the very beginning, there existed an irreconcilable contrast between the aspirations of the Slovenes and the expectations of other parts of the country. While Belgrade allocated most of its educational funds to literacy campaigns, Ljubljana worked towards the Slovenization of secondary schooling and the development of Ljubljana University, which had been established...