ABSTRACT

Multinational Yugoslavia typifies the region’s history of postwar nationality policies, which have alternated between the political and institutional recognition of national diversity and various ideological attempts at national homogenization. The economy of grain export, which increasingly was translated into social and political contingency, retarded the process of urbanization and the growth of manufacture and the middling strata. In fact, the genocidal toll of German rule, most notably in the Nazi plan to destroy the Jews, as well as population losses attributed directly to the war, postwar forcible population transfers, and incidence of political emigration changed the face of Eastern Europe. Always territorial and historical, the nationality question in Eastern Europe is still an overriding political concern in most of the region. Since medieval times the East European lands, or more precisely the lands of the Hungaro-Croat and Polish crowns, have lagged behind the economic and cultural development of Western Europe.