ABSTRACT
In the last fi fteen years or so, the whole public rhetoric in the former Yugoslavia was based solely on national and nationalistic discourse; its function was to rebuild national identities and promote the formation of new states. On the other hand, ever since the nineteenth century and the rise of Romantic ideas about an uber-Slavic culture,1 the national rhetoric was the foundation of all these programs involving political reconstruction of societes in all southern Slavic countries (divided, at that time, among the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Turkey, and Serbia). Even during the communist period (1945-1990), when the nationalistic discourse was in direct opposition with a desired order (the ruling ideology), this was built into the consciousness of every individual who went through a formal educational system, due to the fact that the educational system was, in its larger part, built on Romantic discourse (especially the programs in native language and history).2
