Contesting the Habsburg empire in everyday life : the Habsburg legacy as a source of everyday conflict in interwar Yugoslav society

Abstract

In the aftermath of the First Word War, a sizable part of the former Habsburg Empire ended up within the borders of the newly established Yugoslav nationstate. While the zeitgeist of the new “national” world demanded that Yugoslavia’s population should unanimously reject the defunct empire’s legacy, popular attitudes towards the previous regime among the state’s diverse inhabitants were more ambivalent. Employing archival records from the Regional Courts of Maribor (Slovenia) and Sombor (Serbia), this chapter explores how discussions of the Habsburg Empire functioned as a source of everyday conflict between predominantly non-elite actors in interwar Yugoslav society. In such interpersonal clashes, references to the bygone empire served a diverse array of discursive functions. The characterization of people or institutions as “Habsburg” functioned as a form of boundary-drawing and othering within Yugoslav society, and nostalgic references to the imperial past figured as conscious polemical counterpoints in critical discussions of the national present. While comparisons between Habsburg and Yugoslav rule remained frequent in discussions throughout the interwar period, non-elite actors rarely reflected on the differences between empire and nation-state on an abstract level. Instead, their attitudes towards either regime were typically rooted in their subjective experiences within very local contexts.