Dalmatian identity, or sometimes also Dalmatianism, Dalmatianness or Dalmatian nationalism, refers to the historical nationalism or patriotism of Dalmatians and Dalmatian culture. There were significant Dalmatian nationalists in the 19th century, but Dalmatian regional nationalism faded in significance over time in favor of ethnic nationalism. [1]
17th century Dalmatian poet Jerolim Kavanjin (Girolamo Cavagnini) exhibited Dalmatianism, identifying himself as "Dalmatian" and calling Dalmatia his homeland, which John Fine interprets not to have been a nationalist notion. [2]
During Dalmatia's incorporation in Austrian Empire, with the Autonomist Party in Dalmatia refusing and opposed plans to incorporate Dalmatia into Croatia; instead it supported an autonomous Dalmatia based on a multicultural association of Dalmatia's ethnic communities: Croats, Serbs, and Italians, united as Dalmatians. [3] The Autonomist Party has been accused of secretly having been a pro-Italian movement due to their defense of the rights of ethnic Italians in Dalmatia. [3] Also support for the autonomy of Dalmatia, had deep historic roots in identifying Dalmatian culture as linking Western culture via Venetian Italian influence and Eastern culture via South Slavic influence, such a view was supported by Dalmatian autonomist Stipan Ivičević. [4] The Autonomist Party did not claim to be an Italian movement, and indicated that it sympathized with a sense of heterogeneity amongst Dalmatians in opposition to ethnic nationalism. [3] In the 1861 elections, the Autonomists won twenty-seven seats in Dalmatia, while Dalmatia's Croatian nationalist movement, the People's Party, won only fourteen seats. [5]
The issue of autonomy of Dalmatia was debated after the creation of Yugoslavia in 1918, due to divisions within Dalmatia over proposals of merging the region with the territories composing the former Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia. [6] Proposals for the autonomy of Dalmatia within Yugoslavia were made by Dalmatians within the Yugoslav Partisans during World War II; however, these proposals were strongly opposed by Croatian Communists and the proposals were soon abandoned. [7]
Dalmatian National Party (Croatian : Dalmatinska nacionalna stranka) was a political organisation in Croatia (despite its name, it was not registered as political party) which promoted revival of Dalmatian language and creation of autonomous region of Dalmatia in Dalmatia and Quarnaro islands region.
Dalmatia is one of the four historical regions of Croatia, alongside Central Croatia, Slavonia, and Istria, located on the east shore of the Adriatic Sea in Croatia.
The Corfu Declaration was an agreement between the prime minister of Serbia, Nikola Pašić, and the president of the Yugoslav Committee, Ante Trumbić, concluded on the Greek island of Corfu on 20 July 1917. Its purpose was to establish the method of unifying a future common state of the South Slavs living in Serbia, Montenegro and Austria-Hungary after the First World War. Russia's decision to withdraw diplomatic support for Serbia following the February Revolution, as well as the Yugoslav Committee's sidelining by the trialist reform initiatives launched in Austria-Hungary, motivated both sides to attempt to reach an agreement.
The Yugoslav Committee was a World War I-era, unelected, ad-hoc committee that largely consisting of émigré Croat, Slovene, and Bosnian Serb politicians and political activists, whose aim was the detachment of Austro-Hungarian lands inhabited by South Slavs and unification of those lands with the Kingdom of Serbia. The group was formally established in 1915 and it last met in 1919, shortly after the breakup of Austria-Hungary and the establishment of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which was later renamed Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav Committee was led by its president the Croat lawyer Ante Trumbić and, until 1916, by Croat politician Frano Supilo as its vice president.
Italian irredentism was a political movement during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Italy with irredentist goals which promoted the unification of geographic areas in which indigenous peoples were considered to be ethnic Italians. At the beginning, the movement promoted the annexation to Italy of territories where Italians formed the absolute majority of the population, but retained by the Austrian Empire after the Third Italian War of Independence in 1866.
Regionalism is a political ideology that seeks to increase the political power, influence and self-determination of the people of one or more subnational regions. It focuses on the "development of a political or social system based on one or more" regions, and/or the national, normative, or economic interests of a specific region, group of regions or another subnational entity, gaining strength from or aiming to strengthen the "consciousness of and loyalty to a distinct region with a homogeneous population", similarly to nationalism. More specifically, "regionalism refers to three distinct elements: movements demanding territorial autonomy within unitary states; the organization of the central state on a regional basis for the delivery of its policies including regional development policies; political decentralization and regional autonomy".
The Kingdom of Dalmatia was a crown land of the Austrian Empire (1815–1867) and the Cisleithanian half of Austria-Hungary (1867–1918). It encompassed the entirety of the region of Dalmatia, with its capital at Zadar.
Greater Croatia is a term applied to certain currents within Croatian nationalism. In one sense, it refers to the territorial scope of the Croatian people, emphasising the ethnicity of those Croats living outside Croatia. In the political sense, though, the term refers to an irredentist belief in the equivalence between the territorial scope of the Croatian people and that of the Croatian state.
The History of Dalmatia concerns the history of the area that covers eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea and its inland regions, from the 2nd century BC up to the present day. The region was populated by Illyrian tribes around 1,000 B.C, including the Delmatae, who formed a kingdom and for whom the province is named. Later it was conquered by Rome, thus becoming the province of Dalmatia, part of the Roman Empire. Dalmatia was ravaged by barbaric tribes in the beginning of the 4th century.
Croatian nationalism is nationalism that asserts the nationality of Croats and promotes the cultural unity of Croats.
The Istrian–Dalmatian exodus was the post-World War II exodus and departure of local ethnic Italians as well as ethnic Slovenes and Croats from Yugoslavia. The emigrants, who had lived in the now Yugoslav territories of the Julian March, Kvarner and Dalmatia, largely went to Italy, but some joined the Italian diaspora in the Americas, Australia and South Africa. These regions were ethnically mixed, with long-established historic Croatian, Italian, and Slovene communities. After World War I, the Kingdom of Italy annexed Istria, Kvarner, the Julian March and parts of Dalmatia including the city of Zadar. At the end of World War II, under the Allies' Treaty of Peace with Italy, the former Italian territories in Istria, Kvarner, the Julian March and Dalmatia were assigned to now Communist-helmed Federal Yugoslavia, except for the Province of Trieste. The former territories absorbed into Yugoslavia are part of present-day Croatia and Slovenia.
The Serb-Catholic movement in Dubrovnik was a cultural and political movement of people from Dubrovnik who, while Catholic, declared themselves Serbs, while Dubrovnik was part of the Habsburg-ruled Kingdom of Dalmatia in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Initially spearheaded by intellectuals who espoused strong pro-Serbian sentiments, there were two prominent incarnations of the movement: an early pan-Slavic phase under Matija Ban and Medo Pucić that corresponded to the Illyrian movement, and a later, more Serbian nationalist group that was active between the 1880s and 1908, including a large number of Dubrovnik intellectuals at the time. The movement, whose adherents are known as Serb-Catholics or Catholic Serbs, largely disappeared with the creation of Yugoslavia.
Dalmatian Italians are the historical Italian national minority living in the region of Dalmatia, now part of Croatia and Montenegro.
The Governorate of Dalmatia was an administrative division of the Kingdom of Italy established in from 1918 to 1920 and from 1941 to 1943. The first Governorate of Dalmatia was established following the end of World War I, given the London Pact (1915), and was disastablished following the Treaty of Rapallo. The London Pact also promised Italy part of Dalmatia. However, both the peace settlement negotiations of 1919 to 1920 and the Fourteen Points of Woodrow Wilson, who advocated self-determination, took precedence, with Italy being permitted to annex only Zadar from Dalmatia, with the rest of Dalmatia being part of Yugoslavia. Enraged Italian nationalists considered the decision to be a betrayal of the promises of the London Pact, so this outcome was denounced as a "mutilated victory".
The Autonomist Party was an Italian-Dalmatianist political party in the Dalmatian political scene, that existed for around 70 years of the 19th century and until World War I. Its goal was to maintain the autonomy of the Kingdom of Dalmatia within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as opposed to the unification with the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia. The Autonomist Party has been accused of secretly having been a pro-Italian movement due to their defense of the rights of ethnic Italians in Dalmatia. The Autonomist Party did not claim to be an Italian movement, and indicated that it sympathized with a sense of heterogeneity amongst Dalmatians in opposition to ethnic nationalism. In the 1861 elections, the Autonomists won twenty-seven seats in Dalmatia, while Dalmatia's Croatian nationalist movement, the National Party, won only fourteen seats. This number rapidly decreased: already in 1870 autonomists lost their majority in the Diet, while in 1908 they won just 6 out of 43 seats.
Jerolim Kavanjin, also known as Girolamo Cavagnini, was a Venetian poet from Spalato who wrote in the Croatian language.
Yugoslavism, Yugoslavdom, or Yugoslav nationalism is an ideology supporting the notion that the South Slavs, namely the Bosniaks, Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Serbs and Slovenes, but also Bulgarians, belong to a single Yugoslav nation separated by diverging historical circumstances, forms of speech, and religious divides. During the interwar period, Yugoslavism became predominant in, and then the official ideology of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. There were two major forms of Yugoslavism in the period: the regime favoured integral Yugoslavism promoting unitarism, centralisation, and unification of the country's ethnic groups into a single Yugoslav nation, by coercion if necessary. The approach was also applied to languages spoken in the Kingdom. The main alternative was federalist Yugoslavism which advocated the autonomy of the historical lands in the form of a federation and gradual unification without outside pressure. Both agreed on the concept of National Oneness developed as an expression of the strategic alliance of South Slavs in Austria-Hungary in the early 20th century. The concept was meant as a notion that the South Slavs belong to a single "race", were of "one blood", and had shared language. It was considered neutral regarding the choice of centralism or federalism.
There are several points of dispute over the ethnic and linguistic identity of several communities in Montenegro, some of them related to identity of people who self-identify as ethnic Montenegrins, while some other identity issues are also related to communities of Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks and ethnic Muslims. All of those issues are mutually interconnected and highly politicized.
The May Declaration was a manifesto of political demands for unification of South Slav-inhabited territories within Austria-Hungary put forward to the Imperial Council in Vienna on 30 May 1917. It was authored by Anton Korošec, the leader of the Slovene People's Party. The document was signed by Korošec and thirty-two other council delegates representing South-Slavic lands within the Cisleithanian part of the dual monarchy – the Slovene Lands, the Dalmatia, Istria, and the Condominium of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The delegates who signed the declaration were known as the Yugoslav Club.
Montenegrin nationalism is the nationalism that asserts that Montenegrins are a nation and promotes the cultural unity of Montenegrins.
Italian irredentism in Dalmatia was the political movement supporting the unification to Italy, during the 19th and 20th centuries, of Adriatic Dalmatia.