The Racial Idea in the Independent State of Croatia: Origins and Theory by Nevenko Bartulin (review)

In his recent study Nevenko Bartulin seeks to “trace the intellectual and/or ideological origins and the wartime articulation and propagation” of Ustasha ideas about ethno-linguistic origins, racial anthropology, and race theory. His study challenges existing historiographical interpretations concerning the role of racial ideology in the Independent State of Croatia. Those interpretations have tended to view the Ustasha movement’s ideas as subordinate to other political aims, lacking in any kind of consistency, or adopted wholesale from National Socialist biological concepts. The author argues instead that Ustasha racial notions constituted a far more coherent set of ideas than scholars have previously assumed. Rather than blindly copying from Germany, Ustasha ideologues were able to draw on a substantial intellectual discourse on the definition of Croatian and “non-Croatian” identity. From the moment the Ustasha movement was founded in the early 1930s, “ethnic-racial nationalism” formed the basis of its ideology; the Ustasha program redefined “the very notion of Croatian nationhood,” casting the Croatians as a “unique white Indo-European people that exhibited the physical and mental traits of the main European racial types (Nordic, Dinaric, Alpine, Mediterranean and East Baltic) while the best Croats specifically bore the traits of the ‘exceptional’ Dinaric and Nordic races” (pp. 9–10, 14).

Bartulin has produced a systematic study of the origins of Ustasha racial ideology, a subject previously studied only superficially. His is not a history of the Ustasha movement, state, or racial policy within it, but rather an intellectual history of the construction of racial identity from the beginning of the first modern national movement in Croatia in the 1830s to the fall of the Ustasha state in 1945. Indeed, one of the strengths of The Racial Idea is that it covers an impressive time span; another is that it provides a detailed account of the native intellectual origins of many of the Ustasha’s ideas, undercutting the overemphasis scholars have placed on borrowing. One of the things The Racial Idea does very well is to illustrate the consistency of radical-right ideas from the late nineteenth-century onwards, their complexity, and, ironically, their indebtedness to Yugoslav racial anthropology, especially the “Dinaric theory.” The author presents a provocative argument that the evolution of Ustasha policy toward the Serbs—from extermination to assimilation—was driven far more by racial ideology than hitherto assumed. While most scholars have treated the policy shift to forced assimilation as a result of situational stimuli from below (the Serb-led uprising against the new Croatian state in summer 1941) and above (the Italian and German occupations), Bartulin draws on the texts of a number of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century geographers, anthropologists, and race theorists to argue that radical Croat nationalists had long distinguished different groups of Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia: an assimilable population originally Croatian or “Slavic-Aryan,” and a non-assimilable admixture of different Vlach, nomadic, and “near eastern” groups who should be eradicated. Seen from this perspective, Bartulin writes, Ustasha policy was not specifically anti-Serbian but “‘anti-Vlach’ and ‘anti-Asiatic,’ for it was the Near Eastern racial element within the Serbian people—together with the racially non-Aryan Jewish and Gypsy minorities—that was said to represent the real threat to the racial unity and health of the Croatian people” (p. 223).

Despite the positive contribution this book makes, I have a number of reservations, both on empirical and interpretative grounds. First, the book relies almost entirely on intellectual texts and uses next to no archival sources. As a result, we get no sense of how influential intellectuals’ ideas were among the general public or—more to the point—on the various ministries leading the development of demographic, racial, educational, and health policy.

Second, some scholars will strongly contest the argument that Ustasha racial ideology was motivated more by a sense of “anti-Yugoslavism than anti-Serbianism,” aiming to “eradicate the Yugoslav idea and...